Lord Clairvaux arrived in time for Madame Mila’s dinner. He was an
affectionate and sunny-tempered man; he did not notice that his sister
did not once say she was glad to see him.
Della Rocca did notice it, with that delicate unerring Italian
perception, which is as fine as a needle and as subtle as mercury.
He saw, too, that something had come over her,—some cloud, some change;
she had lost much of her proud serenity, and she looked at him now and
then with what seemed to him almost like contrition; she avoided being
alone with him; he was troubled at it, but not alarmed; he knew very well
that she loved him. He let her be.
An Italian has infinite passion, but he has also infinite patience in
matters of love. Nor was he, now that he was assured of his power over
her, wholly content to use it: if he married her, the world would always
say that it was for her wealth. That means of raising his own fortunes,
which had seemed to him so material and legitimate all his life, now
seemed to him unworthy and unmanly since he had grown to care for her. He
knew that such riches as she possessed were precisely those with which
he had always intended to rebuild the fallen greatness of his race; but
since he had loved her it looked very different.
The charm of their intercourse to him was the ascendency he had won over
her, the power that he had gained to lift her nature to a higher level:
where would his influence be when he had once stooped to enrich himself
by its means?
These fancies saddened him and checked him, and made him not unwilling to
linger on about her, in all that indistinct sweetness of half-recognized
and half-unspoken love.
The position, uncertain as it was, had its charm: he felt that this
woman, with all her insolence and indifference and absorption by the
world, was, in his hands, only a creature of emotions and of passions,
who would flush at his touch and grow unnerved under his gaze; he knew
that he was very dear to her, since had it not been for the audacity of
his caresses he would have been driven out of her presence.
“Ama chi t’ama e lascia dir la gente,” he said to himself, in the wise
burden of the people’s love-song; and he let destiny go as it would.
Meanwhile, she, dissatisfied, with a conscience ill at ease, and
disinclined to look into the future, saw him morning, noon, and night,
but avoided seeing him alone, and usually had her brother near.
Lord Clairvaux could only stay a week, and was utterly unconscious that
his presence was unwelcome; he was taken to see the two Arab mares of
Della Rocca; he was taken to Palestrina; he was taken to studios and
chapels, which had no more interest for him than they would have had for
a setter dog: but he was quite ignorant of why he was taken.
He did what Lady Hilda told him to do; he always did when he and
she were together; he was a simple, kindly, honest gentleman; who
regarded England as the universe, and all the rest of the world as a
mere accident. His sister’s contempt for her country and his politics,
her philosophy of indifferentism, her adoration of primitive art, her
variable disdain, and her intellectual pharisaism had always seemed to
him very wonderful, and not altogether comfortable; but he admired her
in a hopeless kind of way, and it was not in his temper to puzzle over
people’s differences of opinion or character.
“Hilda thinks all the old dead fellows were gods, and she thinks all of
us asses,” he would say, humbly. “I don’t know, you know: she’s awfully
clever. I never was. It may be so; only I never will believe that England
is used up, as she says; and I like the east wind myself; and what she
can see in those saints she’s just bought, painted on their tiptoes, or
in those old crooked pots;—but if she’d stayed in the country, and hunted
twice a week all winter, you know she would not have been like that.”
“It would have been a great pity had Miladi been anything save what she
is,” said Della Rocca, to whom he expressed himself in this manner, in
such French as he could command, and who was amused and astonished by
him, and who took him a day’s wild-fowl-shooting in the marshes, and a
day’s wild-boar-hunting in the next province, and wondered constantly why
so kindly and gallant a gentleman should have been made by the good God
so very stupid.
“Oh, you think so; I don’t,” said Lord Clairvaux. “Hilda isn’t my idea
of a happy woman. I don’t believe she is happy. She spends half her
life thinking how she will dress herself; and why will they dress now
like the ruffs and things of Queen Elizabeth, and the effigies on the
tombstones? and the other half she spends buying things she never looks
at, and ordering things she dislikes when they’re done, and reading books
that make her think her own countrymen are a mere lot of blockheads and
barbarians. Not that I pretend to understand her; I never did; only
I think if she didn’t think everybody else such a fool she’d be more
comfortable.”
Della Rocca smiled.
“Pardon me, you will disturb the birds.”
Lord Clairvaux recollected that he ought not to talk of his sister to a
stranger, and, bringing his gun to his shoulder, fired into a covey of
wild ducks.
“What a handsome fellow that is!—like an old picture,” he thought to
himself, as he looked at Della Rocca, who sat in the prow of the boat;
but he did not connect him in his thoughts with Lady Hilda in any way:
for ten years he had got so tired of vainly wondering why this man and
that did not please her, and had been made so vexed and perplexed by her
rejection of the Prince of Deutschland, that he had ceased to think of
her as a woman who could possibly ever care for anybody.
One night, however, when he had been there five days, he was walked about
in the crowd of the Veglione by little Madame Mila, masked, and draped
as black as a little beetle; and Madame Mila, who was getting tired of
things standing still, and could no more help putting her tiny finger
into all kinds of pasties, and making mischief in a kittenish way, than
she could help going on enameling since she had once begun it, laughed
at him, teased him, and told him what startled him.
“But she isn’t here, and he is!” he gasped, feebly, in protest at what he
had heard, gazing over the motley crowd.
“What a goose you are!—as if that showed anything! They can meet much
better than in this place,” said Madame Mila, with a saucy laugh.
He turned on her with a heavy frown.
“Hang it, Mila! you don’t dare to mean——”
Madame Mila was frightened in an instant.
“Oh, dear, no; of course not; only I do assure you they’ve been always
together ever since I’ve been in Floralia. I thought you knew——”
“Damn it, no!” he muttered. “I beg your pardon; I never see anything; I
mean, I’m quite sure there’s nothing to see.”
“Well, ask her,” said Madame Mila: then she added, sweetly, “You know I’m
so fond of dear Hilda; and people do talk so horridly here for nothing at
all; and Italians are not so scrupulous as _we_ are.”
He went home in haste, and was told that Miladi had retired to bed full
two hours before. In the morning he sent to ask when he could see her.
She sent back word that she should be happy to see him at breakfast at
twelve. At ten he received a telegram from his wife asking him to return,
because his eldest boy, Cheviot, was unwell, and they feared typhoid
fever.
“Damn it all, what a worry!” said Lord Clairvaux to himself, and then
went out and smoked on the bank of the river, and looked over the stone
parapet moodily.
“Bon-jour, monsieur,” a soft and melodious voice said, passing him.
Della Rocca was driving past with a fiery little horse on his way to
Palestrina. Lord Clairvaux felt inclined to stop the horse; but what
could he say if he did?
What a nuisance it was, he thought; but what could go right in a country
where they shot their foxes, and called their brushes tails, and hung
them under the ears of cart-mules and ponies?—a country where they
treated the foxes as they did, to say nothing of the Holy Father, must be
a land of malediction.
He smoked through two great cigars, and walked about the town unhappily,
and when it was noon went up-stairs to his sister. He did not dare to go
a moment before the time.
“Dear Freddie, is it you?” said the Lady Hilda, listlessly; she looked
very lovely and very languid, in a white cashmere morning gown, with a
quantity of lace about it, and her hair all thrown back loosely and tied
like the Venere alla Spina’s.
“I have to go away by the night train. Poor little Cheviot’s ill,” he
said, disconsolately, as he took her hand; he never ventured on kissing
her; years before she had taught him that such endearments were very
ridiculous and disagreeable.
“Dear me! I am very sorry. Will you have coffee, or tea, or wine?” she
asked, absently, as she went to the table where the breakfast was.
“Chevy’s very ill,” said Lord Clairvaux, who thought she showed small
sympathy. “You used to like Chevy.”
“He was a pretty little child. I hate boys.”
“You wouldn’t if you had them of your own,” said Lord Clairvaux, and
grumbled inaudibly as he took some cutlets.
Lady Hilda colored a little.
“I have really not imagination enough to follow you. Will you have
coffee? I hope it’s nothing serious with Cheviot?”
“Fever, his mother thinks: any way, I must go. I saw your friend the Duca
della Rocca this morning: he was out early.”
He thought this was approaching the subject in a masterly manner.
“Italians always rise early,” said the Lady Hilda, giving him his cup.
“And he was at the Veglione last night——”
“All Italians go to the Veglione.”
“You have seen a great deal of him, haven’t you?” asked Lord Clairvaux,
looking at her across the table, and thinking how pretty all that white
was which she had on, and what a difficult person she was to begin
anything with; he had never felt so nervous since the time when he had
been called on as a young man to move the Address when Parliament opened.
“One sees a great deal of everybody in a small society like this.”
“Because, you know, people talk about you and him: so they say, at least.”
“They are very good, whoever they are: who are they?”
“Who?—Oh, I don’t know; I heard so.”
“How very nice of you to discuss me with other people!”
Lord Clairvaux cast a glance at her, and was very much frightened at the
offense he saw in her contemptuous face. How pale she was looking, too,
now he thought of it! and she had shadows underneath her eyes quite new
to her.
“What sort of a fellow is he?” he muttered. “He seemed a duffer to
me about his fields,—such plows, by heavens!—and such waste in the
stack-yards _I_ never saw. But it isn’t farming here at all; it’s letting
things go wild just anyhow——”
“It is not being wiser than Nature, and sacrificing all loveliness to
greed,—if you mean _that_,” said Lady Hilda, with coldest disdain. “The
life here has still the old Theocritan idyllic beauty, thank heaven.”
“Theocritus? Oh, I know; I never could construe him; but I do know a
straight furrow and decently-kept land when I see it. But I say, you
know, I don’t wish to be officious or anything, but do you think it’s
wise to see so very much of him? You know he’s an Italian, and I dare say
hasn’t a bit of principle, nor a penny in his pocket.”
The hazel eyes of the Lady Hilda flashed golden beams of wrath.
“How very grateful of you!—when he has entertained you to the best of his
ability, and went out of his way to find sport for you, very little to
his own pleasure, moreover, for I can assure you _his_ soul does not lie
in his gun-barrel!”
“I don’t want to say anything against him,” murmured Lord Clairvaux, who
was the most grateful and most just of mortals. “He was very kind and
courteous, and all that; and I don’t say he’s a bad shot,—though he’s
a bad farmer; and he is an awfully good-looking fellow, like an old
picture, and all that. Only I must go to-night, Hilda, and I do want to
speak to you.”
“You are speaking all this time, I believe,” said Lady Hilda, icily,
looking across at him with the coldest challenge in her darkening eyes.
“I never could think why you didn’t take Deutschland,” he muttered,
reverting to an old grievance.
“He didn’t please me. Is that all you wanted to say?”
“But I thought you’d have cared to be a reigning sovereign?”
“Of a small State?” said the Lady Hilda, with an eloquent lift of her
eyebrows.
“Well, there was De Ribeaupierre; he was everything anybody could want;
Vienna, too. I used to think an Ambassadress’s life would just suit you.”
“Always calling on people, and writing notes? No life on earth more
tiresome.”
“I suppose you want to be an Empress?”
“Oh, dear, no,” answered his sister. “I have known two Empresses
intimately; and it is a career of great tedium: you can never do what you
like.”
“Then I suppose you are content as you are?”
“I suppose so, if anybody ever is. I don’t think any one is. I never met
anybody who was. They say pigs are; but one sees so little of pigs that
one can’t make much psychological study of them.”
Lord Clairvaux grumbled, sighed, and took his courage _à deux mains_.
“Well, never mind the other men,—they are past and gone, poor wretches:
what do you mean to do about this one?”
“This what?” said Lady Hilda, looking languidly at him through the
flowers on the breakfast-table. She knew quite well what he meant.
“What do you mean to do with him?” repeated Lord Clairvaux, solemnly,
pushing his plate away. “It’s all very pretty, I dare say,—Romeo, and
moonlight, and poetry, and all that sort of thing; Italians are the deuce
and all for that: only I shouldn’t have thought you’d have cared for it;
and, besides, you know it can’t go on:—the man’s a gentleman, that I
grant; and, by heaven, that’s a great deal nowadays, such blackguards as
we’re getting,—three card scandals in the clubs already this very winter,
and George Orme’s was regular sharping, just what any cad might do, by
Jove! But you know you can’t go on with it; you can’t possibly mean it
seriously: now, do you?”
Lady Hilda laughed that little, cold, contemptuous laughter which her
brother always shivered under, and which Della Rocca had never heard.
“I don’t seriously mean to cheat at cards! My dear Frederic, you must
say what you mean, if you mean anything at all, a little more clearly,
please. Why will all Englishmen get their talk into such odd confusion? I
suppose it comes of never learning grammar at Eton.”
“Well, hang it, then, I’ll say it clearly,” retorted Clairvaux, with some
indignation. “Mila tells me you and this Italian that’s always after you
have taken a liking to one another: is it true?—and what do you mean to
do with him? There!”
He was horribly frightened when he had said it, but what he thought was
his duty, that he did: and he conceived it to be his duty to speak.
All the blood leaped into the fair face of the Lady Hilda, her nostrils
dilated in a fine anger, her lips grew pale.
“Mila is a little wretch!” she said, with strong passion; then was
still; she was too generous to quote her own generosity, or urge her
past gifts as present claims. “She is a little fool!” she added, with
bitter disdain. “And how can _you_ cheapen my name by listening to her
chattering folly? Besides, what have you to do with me?—or what has she?
I am not used to dictation, nor to interference.”
“Oh, I know,” said her brother, humbly. “And I beg your pardon, I am
sure, and all that;—only, just tell me, how will it end?”
“How will what end?”
“This fancy of yours.”
Lady Hilda grew very pale.
“My dear Clairvaux,” she said, with chilliest contempt, “you are not my
keeper, nor my husband, nor anything else, except one of my trustees. I
do not know that being a trustee gives you a title to be impertinent. You
really talk as you might to your game-keeper’s daughter if you thought
you saw the girl ‘going wrong.’ What M. Della Rocca feels for me, or I
for him, is merely sympathy in views and tastes. But if it were anything
else, whose business would it be?”
Lord Clairvaux laughed.
“Yes!—you are a likely creature to inspire friendship! As if there were
ever a woman worth looking at who could keep a man at _that_!—Don’t let
us fence about it, Hilda. Perhaps I haven’t any right to say anything;
you’re your own mistress, and all that, and answerable to nobody. Only,
can you deny that I am your brother?”
“I have always understood you were. I confess you make me regret the
circumstance.”
“Now, that’s ill-natured, very ill-natured,” he murmured, pathetically.
“But you won’t make me quarrel. There must be two to quarrel, and I won’t
be one. We have always been good friends, more than good friends. I
thought I was the only person on earth you did like——”
“And, like every one else, you consider that the liking you inspire
confers a privilege to be impertinent,” said his sister, with all that
disdainful anger flashing from her languid eyes, which none of her family
ever cared very much to meet.
She had risen from her chair, and was moving to and fro with a restless
controlled impatience. She remained very pale. Clairvaux kept his
position on the hearth-rug, with a dogged good humor and an uneasy
confusion blended together which, at any other time, would have diverted
her.
“Perhaps I may be impertinent,” he said, humbly, “though hang me if I can
see that that’s a natural sort of word to be used between a brother and
sister. I know you’re a mighty great lady, and ‘a law to yourself,’ as
some poet says, and never listen to anybody, and always go your own ways,
and all that; but still, if you never speak to me afterwards, I must say
what I want to say. This man is in love with you; it’s my belief you’re
in love with him,—Mila says so, and she knows. Now, granted that it is so
(if it isn’t, there’s nothing to be angry about),—what I say is, how do
you mean it to end? Will you marry him?”
Her face changed, flushed, and then grew pale again.
“Of course not! You know it is impossible!”
“Does he know why it is impossible?”
“No: why should he? Really, you do not know what you are talking about.
You are interfering in the most uncalled-for manner where there is not
the slightest necessity for any interference.”
“Then you are letting him fall in love with you in the dark, and when you
have had enough of the sport will throw him over?”
“You grow very coarse, Clairvaux. Oblige me by dropping the subject.”
“I didn’t know I was coarse. That is what you are going to do. You accept
all his court now, and then you’ll turn round on him some fine morning
and say you’ve had enough of it. At least, I can’t see what else you will
do,—since you cannot marry him. You’ll hardly lower yourself to Mila’s
level and all the other women’s,—by heavens, if I thought you would,
if I thought you had done, I’d soon see if this fellow were as fine a
swordsman as they say!”
Lady Hilda turned her face full on him.
“So my brother is the first person that ever dared to insult me?” she
said, with utmost coldness, as she rose from the breakfast-table and
swept his feet in passing with the lace that fringed the hem of her
cashmere robes.
She gave him one parting look, and left the chamber.
He stood cowed by the golden fire of those superb imperious hazel eyes.
He was nervous at what he had done, and unhappy and perplexed. He stood
alone, pulling at his fair beard, in troubled repentance. He knew what
her wrath would be. She was not a woman who quickly forgave.
“I’ve blundered; I always do blunder,” he thought sadly to himself. “She
must care awfully about him, to be so angry.”
He waited all alone many minutes. He was sincerely sorry; perhaps he
had been coarse; he had not meant to be; only, the idea of _her_ talked
about, and with lovers!—just like all those other women whom their
husbands or brothers ought to strangle: it was only fashion, they said,
only the way of the world, all that immorality;—“Damn the world,” he said
to himself, ruffling his beard in sad bewilderment.
He scribbled a trite, rough, penitent note, and sent it to her by her
maid. They brought him a closed envelope: when he opened it he found only
his own note inside,—sent back without any word.
Honest Clairvaux’s eyes filled with tears.
“She’ll never see me again before I go to-night,” he thought to himself,
tossing his poor little rejected morsel into the wood fire. “And I must
go to-night, because of poor little Chevy. How horrid it is!—I couldn’t
be angry like that with her!”
He stood some moments more, knitting his fair fresh forehead, and wishing
that he were less stupid in managing things; he had never in his life
before presumed to condemn and counsel his sister; and this was the
result!
Suddenly an idea struck him, and he rose.
“I will tell him,” he thought. “I will tell him himself. And then I shall
see what sort of stuff he is made of;—I can fight him afterwards if he
don’t satisfy me;—I’ll tell him as if I suspected nothing;—I can make an
excuse, but when he hears it he’ll show what he’s made of. Oh, Lord, if
it were only an Englishman she’d taken a liking to!—and to think that
she’s treated half the best men in Europe as if they were only so many
stones under her feet!”
With a groan, Lord Clairvaux took up his hat, and went forth towards the
Palazzo della Rocca.
At six o’clock that evening he had to take his departure without seeing
his sister again. He went away with a heavy heart.
“How extraordinary she is!” he thought. “Never even to ask me if I told
the man anything or not. And never to bid one good-by! Well, I’ve done
it for the best: I can’t help it. She’ll be sorry if poor little Chevy
should die.”
But the boy did not die; so that his father never learned whether that
event would have touched the heart of Lady Hilda or not.
All the following day she shut herself up in her rooms. She said she was
ill; and, in truth, she felt so. Della Rocca called three times in the
day, but she did not see him; he sent up a great bouquet of the pale
yellow tea-rose of which she was so fond; he had fastened the flowers
together with an antique silver zone on which was the Greek Love in
relief,—the Love of the early Hellenic poets, without wings and with a
mighty sword, the Love of Anacreon, which forges the soul as a smith his
iron, and steeps it in icy waters, after many blows.
She understood the message of the Love, but she sent no message back.
It was a lovely day; underneath the windows the carriages were rolling;
there was the smile of spring on the air as the fleecy clouds went
sailing past; she could see the golden reaches of the river and the
hyacinth-hued hills where Palestrina lay; her heart was heavy; her pulse
was quick; her conscience was ill at ease; her thoughts were restless
and perturbed. Solitude and reflection were so new to her; they appalled
her. When she had been unwell before, which had been but seldom, she
had always beguiled herself by looking over the jewels in their cases,
sorting rare old Marcantonios and Morghens, skimming French feuilletons,
or planning new confections for her vast stores of old laces. But now
none of these distractions were possible to her; she sat doing nothing,
weary, feverish, and full of a passionate pain.
The fact which her brother had told to Della Rocca was, that if she
married again all her riches would pass away from her.
At the time of her marriage her father had been deeply involved in
debt; gambling, racing, and debts of every other kind had been about
him like spiders’ webs; the great capitalist, Vorarlberg, had freed
him on condition of receiving the hand of his young daughter in
exchange. She was allowed to know nothing of these matters; but under
such circumstances it was impossible for the family to be exacting
as regarded settlements: she was abandoned entirely to the old man’s
power. Fortunately for herself, he was taken ill on the very day of
the nuptials, and, after a lingering period of suffering, died, leaving
her mistress of half of one of the finest fortunes in Europe. By birth
he was a Wallachian Jew, brought up in London and Paris, but he had
been naturalized in England, when a youth, for commercial objects, and
the disposition of his property lay under his own control. A year or
two after his death a later testament was found by his lawyers, still
leaving her the same wealth, but decreeing that in the event of her
second marriage everything should pass away from her to the public
charities, save alone her jewels, her horses, all things she might have
purchased, the house in Paris, which had been a gift, and some eight
hundred a year already secured to her. The new will was proved, and she
was informed that she would enjoy her fortune only by this tenure. She
was indifferent. She was quite sure that she would never wish to marry
any one. She loved her wealth and spent it magnificently; and when men
whose own position would have made the loss of her own money of no moment
sued at her feet, she still repulsed them, thinking always, “Le mieux est
l’ennemi du bien.”
The fact of this later will was scarcely known beyond the precincts of
the law and the circle of their own family; but since she had met Della
Rocca, the remembrance of it had kept her awake many a night, and broken
roughly many a day-dream.
To surrender her fortune to become his wife never once occurred to her
as possible. Ten years’ enjoyment of her every whim had made it seem so
inalienably hers. She could no more face the loss of her fortune than
she could have done that of her beauty.
She had entered so early into her great possessions that they had
grown to be a very part of her. The old man who had been her husband
but in name was but a mere ghostly shadow to her. The freedom and the
self-indulgence she had so long enjoyed had become necessary to her as
the air she breathed.
It was not the mere vulgar vaunt or ostentation of wealth that had
attraction for her; it was all the supremacy, the ease, the patronage,
the habits, that great wealth alone makes possible; it was the reign
which she had held throughout Europe; it was the charm of perfectly
irresponsible power. To give up these and hear the cackle of all the
fools she had eclipsed mocking at her weakness! It would be beyond all
endurance.
What was she to do?
The lax moralities of the women of her time were impossible to her
proud and loftier character; and, besides, she felt that a woman who
preferred the world to him would not find in Della Rocca a forgiving or a
submissive lover. When he knew, what would he say?
She turned sick at the thought. After all, she had played with him and
deceived him: he would have just cause of passionate reproach against
her. His love had no wings, but it had a sword.
“Will Miladi be able to dine?” her maid asked her, vaguely alarmed at her
strange stillness and the great paleness of her face.
“Was I to dine anywhere?” she said, wearily.
She was to dine at the Archduchess Anna’s. The Archduchess Anna was
passing through Floralia after three months at Palermo for health, and
was staying in strict _incognita_, and infinite glee, as the Countess
Von Feffers, at the Hotel del Rè; enjoying herself endlessly, as the
gay-hearted lady that she was, even indulging once in the supreme delight
of driving in a cab, and with no other recognition of her great rank than
consisted in the attendance upon her of the handsomest of the king’s
chamberlains.
“Dress me, then,” said Lady Hilda, with a sigh. She could not excuse
herself to the archduchess, whom she had known intimately for years, and
who was to leave Floralia in a week.
“What dress does Madame select?” asked her maid.
“Give me any you like,” she answered them.
She did not care how she would look; she would not meet him; she knew
that he had no acquaintance with the imperial lady.
The maids, left to themselves, gave her the last new one from Worth,—only
six days arrived; a dress entirely white, with knots of purple velvet,
exactly copied from a picture of Boucher’s, and with all the grace of
dead Versailles in its folds. She put a rococo necklace on, with a
portrait of Maria Theresa in it, and went listlessly to the dinner; she
was not thinking about her appearance that night, or she would have said
that she was too pale to wear all that white.
“Goodness me, Hilda, how ill you do look!” said Madame Mila, meeting her
on the stairs, and who was going also.
“No, thanks, I won’t drive with you; two women can’t go in a carriage
without one being _chiffonnée_. That’s an exquisite toilette; that white
brocade is delicious,—stamped with the lilies of France,—very pretty;
only you’re too pale for it to-night, and it’s a pity to wear it only for
the archduchess. She never knows what anybody’s got on their backs. Is
anything the matter, dear?”
“Nothing in the world.”
“Then you must have got a headache. You certainly do look very ill. I
do so hope we shall get away in time for the Veglione. It’s the very
last night, you know. I had such fun last time. I _intrigué’d_ heaps of
people, and Doggendorff I drove wild; I told him everything about his
wife and Lelio Castelpucci, and all against himself that she’d ever told
me. It was such fun: he’d not an idea who I was, for when we were at
supper he came running in breathless to tell us of a horrible little mask
with a voice like a macaw’s;—you know I’d put a pebble under my tongue.”
“Very dangerous pastime, and a very vulgar one,” said the Lady Hilda,
descending the staircase. “How can you go down into that horrible
screeching mob, Mila? It is so very low.”
“My dear, I go anywhere to amuse myself, and Maurice was always near me,
you know, so if I had been insulted—— There’s eight o’clock striking.”
The Hotel del Rè was but ten minutes’ drive along the famous
river-street, which has such an Arabian-Nights-like beauty when the
lamps are lighted, and gleam in long lines adown each shore, and mirror
themselves in the water, whilst dome and bell-tower and palace-roof raise
themselves darkly against the steel-blue sky of the night.
The archduchess had been spending a long day in the galleries, studying
art under the guidance of the handsome chamberlain; she was hungry,
happy, and full of the heartiest spirits; she was a very merry and
good-natured person, about five-and-forty years old, fat and fair, very
badly dressed, and very agreeable, with a frank laugh, and a strong love
of humor; she had had more escapades than any princess in Europe, and had
smoked more cigars than a French newspaper-writer, and had married more
daughters to German cousins than anybody else in the Almanach de Gotha.
Had she been any lesser being, Society would have turned its back on
her; but, being who she was, her nod was elevation, and her cigar ash
honor;—and, to do her justice, she was one of the most amiable creatures
in all creation.
“Ma chère, you are lovelier than ever!—and how do you like this
place?—and is the dear little pug alive? I lost my sweet Zaliote of
asthma in Palermo,” said the archduchess, welcoming the Lady Hilda, as
she did everything, with ardor.
Lady Hilda, answering, felt her colorless cheeks grow warm: in the circle
standing round she recognized Della Rocca. The archduchess had taken a
fancy to the look of him in the street, and had bidden the chamberlain
present him, and then had told him to come to dinner: she liked to
surround herself with handsome men. From Madame Mila he had learned in
the morning that her cousin would dine there at night.
Madame Mila concluded in her own mind that Freddie had had a row with
his sister upon the matter, but that Della Rocca had had nothing said
to him about it by either of them. Madame Mila concluded also that Hilda
had grown sensible, and was doing like other women; though why she looked
so ill about it, Madame Mila could not imagine. Madame Mila did not
comprehend scruples.
It was very painful, for instance, to be allied to any one of the Greek
Church, and a great grief to the Holy Father; but still it was very nice
to be married to a schismatic, because it enabled you to go to balls a
fortnight longer: if it was still your husband’s carnival, you know,
nobody could say anything.
Madame Mila thought you should always do your best to please everybody,
but then you should take care that you pleased yourself first most of
all. The world was easy enough to live in if you did not worry: there
were always unpaid bills to be sure, and they were odious. But then Hilda
never had any unpaid bills; so she never could have anything to annoy her.
Apropos of bills, she hoped Della Rocca would not use his influence with
her cousin so as to prevent her paying other people’s bills. Of course he
wouldn’t do this just as present; but when men had been lovers a little
while, they always turned the poetry into prose, and grew very nearly as
bad as husbands.
Madame Mila watched them narrowly all through dinner.
“If I thought he’d make her stingy, I’d make her jealous of Giulia
Malatesta to-morrow,” she thought to herself. Madame Mila on occasion had
helped or hindered circumstance among her friends and enemies with many
ingenious little devices, and lucky little anonymous notes, and other
innocent shifts and stratagems. It was no use being in the world at all
unless you interfered with the way it went: to be a mere puppet in the
hands of Fate, with the strings of accident dangling to and fro, seemed
to her clever little brain quite unworthy the intelligence of woman.
She never meant to do any harm,—oh, never; only she liked things to go
as she wished them. Who does not? If a few men and women had been made
wretched for life, and people who loved one another devotedly had been
parted forever, and suspicion and hatred crept into the place of trust
and tenderness in certain households, Madame Mila could not help that,
any more than one can help other people being splashed with mud when one
drives down a lane in bad weather. And nobody ever thought Madame Mila
could do any harm,—pretty, good-natured, loquacious little Madame Mila,
running about with her little rose-buds at fancy fairs, and saying, so
sweetly, “Pour nos pauvres,—pour nos chers pauvres!”
“The best little woman in the world,” as everybody said,—Madame Mila
would kiss her female enemies on both cheeks wherever she met them,
and when she had sent an anonymous letter (for fun), always sent an
invitation to dinner just after it, to the same direction.
“I wish I knew how it is really between them,” she thought at the
archduchess’s dinner-table, divided between her natural desire to see her
cousin let fall that “white flower of a blameless life,” which stinks as
garlic in the nostrils of those who have it not, and her equally natural
apprehension that Paolo della Rocca as a lover would not let his mistress
pay other persons’ debts, and would also be sure to see all her letters.
“She’ll tell him everything about everybody,” thought Madame Mila,
uncomfortably; for Della Rocca had a look in his eyes of assured
happiness, which, to the astute experience of Madame Mila, suggested
volumes.
Meantime she was also harassed by the apprehension that she would not be
able to withdraw in time for the Veglione, where Maurice, a baignoir, and
a supper-table awaited her. If the archduchess should sit down to play of
any sort, hope was over, escape would be impossible till day-dawn; and
Madame Mila hated playing with the archduchess; she was afraid to cheat,
and was obliged to pay.
With all the ingenuity, therefore, of which she was mistress, she
introduced the idea of the Veglione into the mind of her hostess, and
so contrived to fascinate her with the idea that the archduchess, who
had gone in her time to five hundred public masked balls, was as hotly
animated into a desire to go to this one as though she had been just let
out of a convent at eighteen years old.
Madame Mila delightedly placed her baignoir at the disposition of her
imperial highness, and her imperial highness invited all her guests to
accompany her. Such invitations are not optional; and Lady Hilda, who
hated noise as her horses hated masks, was borne off by the mirthful,
chattering, and gay-hearted lady, who had no objection to noise, and
loved fun and riot like a street-boy.
Lady Hilda thought a veglione, and a liking for it, both beneath
contempt; yet she was not unwilling to avoid all chance of being alone
with Della Rocca even for a moment. She knew what he would say: his eyes
had said it all the evening a thousand times.
The Archduchess Anna and Madame Mila were both in the very highest
spirits; they had taken a good deal of champagne, as ladies will, and
had smoked a good deal and got thirsty, and had more champagne with some
seltzer water, and the result was the highest of high spirits. Nothing
could be more appropriate to a veglione.
As no reasonable being could stay by choice in one for an hour, it is
strongly advisable that reason should be a little dethroned by a very
dry wine before entering the dingy paradise. Of course nobody ever sees
great ladies “the worse for wine:” they are only the better, as a Stilton
cheese is.
Happy and hilarious, shrouded and masked beyond all possibility of
identification, and ready for any adventure, the Archduchess Anna was no
sooner in the box than she was out of it, and declared her intention of
going down into the crowd. Madame Mila, only too glad, went with her, and
some half-dozen men formed their escort. Lady Hilda excused herself on
the plea of a headache,—a plea not untrue,—and, alone with the Duc de St.
Louis, awaited the return of her hostess. She had only put on her mask
for entry, and had now laid it beside her; she threw aside her domino,
for the heat of the box was stifling, and the whiteness of her dress
shone as lilies do at moonlight. She leaned her cheek on her hand, and
looked down on to the romping, screaming, many-colored throng.
“You are not well to-night, madame?” said the Duc, with the affectionate
solicitude that he felt for all pretty women.
He was puzzled as to how her relations could stand with Della Rocca: the
previous night he had thought everything settled, but now he did not feel
quite so sure.
“The archduchess is so noisy; it always gives me a headache to dine with
her,” said Lady Hilda. “She is very good-natured, but her talking is——!”
“She is an admirable heavy dragoon, _manqué_,” said the Duc. “Most
good-natured, as you say, but trying to the tympanum and the taste. So
Clairvaux left last night?”
“Yes: Cheviot was taken ill.”
“I should have thought it was a racer taken ill, by the consternation he
seemed to be in. I saw him for a moment only.”
She was silent, watching the whirling of the pierrots, harlequins,
scaramouches, and dominoes, who were shrieking and yelling in the throng
below.
“I think he liked his shooting with Paolo?” said the Duc, at a hazard.
“He likes shooting anywhere.”
“Certainly there is something wrong,” thought the Duc, stooping a little
to look at her brocaded white lilies. “What an exquisite toilette!—is one
permitted to say so?”
“Oh, dear, no!” said the Lady Hilda, petulantly. “The incessant talk
about dress is so tiresome and so vulgar: the women who want their
costumes praised are women who have only just begun to dress tolerably
and are still not quite sure of the effects.”
“You are right, as always,” said the Duc, with a little bow and a little
smile. “But now and then perfection surprises us into involuntary
indiscretion. You must not be too severe.”
“Somebody should be severe,” she said, contemptuously. “Society is a
Battle of the Frogs, for rivality in dress and debt.”
The Duc laughed.
“What do you know about it, madame,—you who are as above rivals as above
debts? By the way, you told me you wanted some old Pesaro vases. I found
some yesterday at Biangini’s shop that might please you; they come out
of an old pharmacy in Verona,—perhaps the very pharmacy of Romeo’s
apothecary; and there are some fine old pots too——”
“I am tired of buying things.”
“The weariness of empire!—nothing new. You must take to keeping hens
and chickens, as the Emperor John Vatices did. How does Camille Odissôt
succeed with your ball-room frescoes?”
“I have no idea. Very ill, I dare say.”
“Yes, it is a curious thing that we do not succeed in fresco. The
grace is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of
touch necessary; they are used to masses of color, and they use the
palette-knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature
of our time, is all detail: the grand suggestive vagueness of the
Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes is lost to us under a crowd of
elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be
spiritual or tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks
knew neither domesticity nor melodrama, and the early Italian painters
were imbued with a faith which, if not so virile as the worship of the
Phidian Zeus, yet absorbed them and elevated them in a degree impossible
in the tawdry Sadduceeism of our own day. By the way, when the weather
is milder you must go to Orvieto; you have never been there, I think; it
is the Prosodion of Signorelli. What a fine Pagan he was at heart! He
admired masculine beauty like a Greek; he must have been a singularly
happy man,—few more happy——”
The Duc paused as the handle of the door turned; he was only talking
because he saw that she was too weary or too languid to talk herself; the
door opened, and Della Rocca entered the box again, having escaped from
the archduchess.
“We were speaking of Orvieto; you know more of it than I do. I was
telling Miladi that she must go there about Easter-time,” said the Duc,
hunting for his crush hat beneath the chair. “Take my seat, mon cher, for
a moment; I see Salvareo in the crowd, and I must speak to him about her
imperialissima’s supper. I shall be back in an instant.”
He departed, with no intention of returning, and was assailed in the
corridor by a party of masks, who bore him off gayly between them down
the staircase into the laughing, screaming, and capering multitude.
Della Rocca did not take his chair, but sank into the seat behind her,
while his hand closed on hers.
“Will you not even look at me?” he murmured.
She drew her hand away, and put her mask on, slipping its elastic round
her delicate ears.
“How the crowd yells!” she said, impatiently. “Will the archduchess stay
there long, do you think?”
With gentlest audacity and softest skill he had slipped off the mask and
had laid it behind him before she had realized what he was doing. His
hand had touched her as lightly as though a feather brushed a rose.
She rose in amazed anger, and turned on him coldly.
“M. della Rocca! how dare you presume so far? Give me my mask at once——”
“No,” he said, softly, and he took hold of her hands and drew her towards
the back of the box, where no eyes could reach them, and knelt down
before her as she sat there in the dusky shadow of the dark-red draperies.
“Oh, my love—my love!” he murmured; that was all; but his arms stole
about her, and his head drooped till his forehead rested on her knees.
For the moment she did not repulse him; she did not stir nor speak;
she yielded herself to the embrace, mute and very pale, and moved to a
strange tumult of emotion, whether of anger or of gladness she scarcely
knew.
He lifted his head, and his eyes looked into hers till her own could look
no longer.
“You love me?” he whispered to her, whilst his arms still held her
imprisoned.
She was silent; under the purple knot of velvet at her breast, he saw her
heart heave, her breath come and go; a hot color flushed over all her
face, then faded, and left her again pale as marble.
“It were of no use if—if I did,” she muttered. “You forget yourself.
Leave me.”
But he knelt there, looking at her till the look seemed to burn her like
flame; yet she did not rise,—she, the very hem of whose garment no man
before him had ever dared to touch.
“You love me!” he murmured, and said the same thing again and again and
again, in all the various eloquence of passion. She trembled a little
under his close caress; the dusky red of the box whirled around her; the
shouting of the multitude below beat like the sound of a distant sea on
her ears.
As he kneeled at her feet she touched his forehead one moment with her
hand in a gesture of involuntary tenderness.
“It is of no use,” she said, faintly, again. “You do not understand; you
do not know.”
“Yes, I do know,” he answered her.
“You know!”——
“Yes: your brother told me.”
“And yet?”——
“Since we love one another, is not that enough?”
She breathed like a person suffocated; she loosened herself from his
arms, and drew away from him, and rose.
“It makes no change in you, then!” she said, wonderingly, and looked at
him through a blinding mist, and felt sick and weary and bewildered, as
she had never thought it possible to feel.
“Change in me? What change? save that I am freer to seek you,—that is
all. Oh, my empress, my angel!—is not love enough? Has your life without
love contented you so well that you fear to face love alone?”
He still knelt at her feet, and kissed her hands and her dress, as he
spoke; he looked upward at the pale beauty of her face.
She shivered a little, as with cold.
“That is folly,” she muttered. “You must know it is of no use. I could
not live—poor.”
The word stung him: he rose to his feet; he was silent. After all, what
had he to offer her? he loved her: that was all.
She loosened the chain about her throat, and looked away beyond him
at the lights of the theatre. With an effort she recovered her old
indifferent cold manner.
“You have forgotten yourself: it is all folly: you must know that: you
surprised me into—weakness—for a moment. But it is over now. Give me my
mask, and take me to the carriage.”
“No!”—— He leaned against the door, and looked down on her: all the
rapture of expectancy and of triumph had faded from his face; the pallor
and suffering of a great passion were on it; he had known that she loved
the things of the world, but he had believed that she loved him more.
He was undeceived. He looked at this beautiful woman, with the gold chain
loosed about her throat, and the white brocaded lilies gleaming in the
gloom, and only by a supreme effort did he subdue the bitterness and
brutality which lie underneath all strong passions.
“One moment!” he said, as she moved to reach the door. “Can you say you
have no love for me?”
Her color varied.
“What is the use? Give me my mask.”
“Can you say you do not love me?”
She hesitated; she wished to lie, and could not.
“I did not say that,” she murmured. “Perhaps if things were different——
But as it is—it is no use.”
The half-confession sufficed: it loosened his lips to passionate appeal;
with all the eloquence natural to him and to his language, he poured
out on her all the supplication, all the entreaty, all the persuasion,
that he was master of; he lavished every amorous endearment that his
language held; he painted the joys of great and mutual love with a fervor
and a force that shook her like a whirlwind; he upbraided her with her
caprices, with her coldness, with her selfishness, till the words cut her
like sharp stripes; he besought her by the love with which he loved her,
till the voluptuous sweetness of it stole over all her senses, and held
her silent and enthralled.
He knelt at her feet, and held her hands in his.
“Does your life content you?” he said at the last. “Can greatness of
any sort content a woman without love? Can any eminence, or power, or
possession make her happiness without love? Say that I am poor,—that
coming to me you would come to what in your sight were poverty: is wealth
so great a thing measured against the measureless strength of passion?
Are not the real joys of our lives things unpurchasable? Oh, my love,
my love! If you had no preference for me, I were the vainest fool to
urge you; but, as it is, does the world that tires you, the society
that wearies you, the men and women who fatigue you, the adulation that
nauseates you, the expenditure that after all is but a vulgarity in your
sight, the acquisition that has lost its charm for you with long habit,
like the toys of a child,—are all those things so supreme with you that
you can send me from you for their sake? Is not one hour of mutual love
worth all the world can give?”
His arms held her close, he drew her down to him nearer and nearer till
his head rested on her breast and he felt the tumultuous throbbing of her
heart. For one moment of scarce conscious weakness she did not resist or
repulse him, but surrendered herself to the spell of his power. He moved
her as no mortal creature had ever had strength to do; a whole world
unknown opened to her with his touch and his gaze; she loved him. For one
moment she forgot all else.
But all the while, even in the temporary oblivion to which she had
yielded, she never dreamed of granting what he prayed.
The serenity and pride in her were shaken to their roots; she was humbled
in her own sight; she was ashamed of the momentary delirium to which
she had abandoned herself; she strove in vain to regain composure and
indifference: come what would, he was near to her as no other man had
ever been.
She drew her domino about her with a shudder, though the blood coursed
like fever in her veins.
“You must hate me,—or forget me,” she murmured, as she tried to
take her mask from his hand. “You _know_ it is no use. I could not
live—poor. Perhaps you are right; all those things are habits, follies,
egotisms,—oh, perhaps. But, such as they are,—such as I am,—I could never
live without them.”
He stood erect, and his face grew cold.
“That is your last word, madame?”
“Yes. What else should I say? No other”—her voice faltered a moment,
and grew very weak, “no other man will ever be anything to me, if that
content you. But more is impossible.”
He bowed low in silence, and gave her up her mask.
She felt afraid to look up at his face.
The door opened on them noisily; the archduchess and Madame Mila were
returning to refresh themselves with their supper ere descending again to
fresh diversions. Behind them came the Duc de St. Louis and all the men
of their party, and their servants with the trestles for the setting of
the table in their box.
They were fuller than ever of laughter, mirth, high spirits, and riotous
good humor; their white teeth shone under the lace of their loups, and
their eyes sparkled through the slits. They had frightened some people,
and teased more, and had been mistaken for two low actresses and jested
with accordingly, and were as much flattered as the actresses would have
been had they been taken for princesses.
The Lady Hilda prayed of the archduchess’s goodness to be excused from
awaiting the supper; she had been ill all day, and her headache was very
severe.
The archduchess was in too high spirits to listen very much, or to care
who went or who stayed.
“Take me to the carriage, Duc,” said Lady Hilda, putting her hand on the
arm of M. de St. Louis.
Della Rocca held the door open for her. He bowed very low, once more, as
she passed him.