In three weeks’ time Lady Hilda returned from Rome.
She had been affectionately received by the Holy Father; she had been the
idol of the nobles of the Black; she had bought a quantity of pictures
and marbles, and bronzes, and Castelani jewelry; she had gone to early
mass every day, and ridden hard every day; she had thought Totila would
have been more bearable than Signor Roso, and she had shuddered at the
scraped walls of the Colosseum and the crimson bedaubings of the Palace
of the Cæsars.
She returned contemptuous, disgusted, tired of the age she lived in,
and regretful that she had not spared herself the sight of so much
desecration. She conceived that Genseric or the Constable de Bourbon must
have been much less painful than a syndicate and an army of bricklayers.
She refused to go out anywhere, on the score of its being Lent, and she
meditated going to London for the season to that very big house in Eaton
Square, which she honored for about three months in as many years. She
hated London, and its society was a mob, and its atmosphere was thickened
soda-water, and no other place had such horrible endless dinner-parties.
Still, she was going. When?—oh, to-morrow or next week.
But to-morrow became yesterday, and next week became last week, and her
black-and-white liveries were still airing themselves on the steps of
the Murat, and her black horses still were trotting to and fro the stones
of Floralia, bearing little Madame Mila hither and thither.
Their own mistress stirred out but little; it was damp weather, and she
coughed, and she shut herself up with millions of hyacinths and narcissi,
and painted a St. Ursula on wood for her chapel in Paris.
She painted well, but the St. Ursula progressed but slowly.
When she was alone she would let her palette fall to her side, and sit
thinking; and the bells would ring across the waters till she hated them.
What was the use of painting a St. Ursula? St. Ursula did not want to be
painted; and all art was nothing but repetition: nobody had found out
anything in color really, since Giotto, though to be sure he could not
paint transparencies or reflections. And she would leave her St. Ursula
impatiently, and read Cavalcaselle and Zugler and Winckelmann and Rumohr
and Passavant, and when she did go out would go to some little remote
unvisited chapel and sit for hours before some dim disputed fresco.
She would be in London next week, in its blaze of gas, jewels, luxury,
and political discussion. She said that she liked these calm, dusky,
silent places, alone with St. Louis and St. Giles and St. Jerome.
Madame Mila puzzled over her conduct in vain. She did not dare to ask
anything, because there were those sixty thousand francs, and her
cousin had helped her about them, and you cannot say very intrusive or
impertinent things to a person who is lending you money; but it was very
odd, thought Madame Mila incessantly, because she evidently was unhappy
about the man, and wanted him, and yet must have sent him away. Of course
she couldn’t have married him; but still there were ways of managing
everything; and in Hilda’s position she really could do as she liked, and
nobody ever would even have said a word.
“She must have refused him,” the Duc de St. Louis said to her more
than once, harassed by chagrin at the failure of his project, and by a
curiosity which his good breeding forbade him to seek to satisfy at the
fountain-head.
“Oh, I dare say she did,” said Madame Mila. “Of course she did. But, if
she cares for him, why should she send him away?—il y a des moyens pour
tout.”
Of course she would not have married him; that Madame Mila knew; but
Society would have made no objection to his being about her always like
her courier and her pug and the rest of her following, and if Society
doesn’t object to a thing, why on earth should you not do it?
Il ne faut pas être plus royaliste que le roi: there cannot be the
slightest necessity to be more scrupulous than the people that are round
you; indeed, to attempt to be more so is to be disagreeable and tacitly
impertinent to others.
There is a certain latitude, which, taken, makes you look much more
amiable. Madame Mila was kissed on both cheeks really with sincerity
by many ladies in many cities, merely because her nice management of
her Maurice made their Maurices easier for them, and their pleasant
consciousness of her frailty was the one touch which made them all akin.
Polyandry made easy is a great charm in Society; there is no horrid
scandal for any one, and no fuss at all. Monsieur is content and Madame
enjoys herself, everybody goes everywhere, and everything is as it should
be.
“If that old man had lived, Hilda would have been glad to be like every
one else,” Madame Mila thought, with much impatience. “Of course, because
she is quite free, she don’t care a bit to use her freedom.”
Madame Mila herself felt that although her passion for Maurice was
the fifty-sixth passion of her soul, and the most ardent of all her
existence, even Maurice himself would have lost some of his attraction
if he had lost the pleasant savor of incorrectness that attached to him,
and if she had not had to take all those precautions about his going
to another hotel, etc., etc., which enabled her to hold her place in
courts and embassies and made her friends all able to say with clear
consciences, “Nothing in it, oh, _dear_! nothing in it whatever!” Not
that she cared about any one believing that; she did not even wish
anybody to believe it; she only wanted it said,—that was all; because,
whilst it can be said a woman “goes everywhere” still, and though Heloïse
or Francesca may be willing to “lose the world for love,” the Femme
Galante has no notion of doing anything of the sort.
“They are _brouillés_, that is certain,” Madame Mila responded to the
conjectures of M. de St. Louis. “Oh, yes,—certain! He was here when Hilda
came back, and we passed him one day in the street, and he took off his
hat and bowed, and looked very cold and pale and went onwards. Now, you
know, he is gone to the Marshes, and after that, they say, he is going
into Sicily to see after that brigand Pibro. It is not like an Italian to
be so soon repulsed.”
“It is very like an Italian to be too proud to ask twice,” said the Duc,
and added, with a little smile, “He never said anything to me. Only once
lately he said that he was sure that Miladi would be a very different
creature if she had home interests and children!”
“Good gracious!” said Madame Mila, “she was quite right to have nothing
to do with him if he have that kind of ideas. How little he knows her,
too! Hilda is quite unnatural about children,—quite horrid; she never
speaks to them; and when she saw my dear little Lili dressed as Madame
l’Archiduc for the babies’ fancy ball at the Elysée, what do you think
she said? She told me that I polluted the child’s brain before it could
distinguish right from wrong, and that a mixture of Judic and Fashion
at five years old was disgusting. And Lili looked lovely!—she was so
prettily rouged, and Maurice had given her a necklace of pink pearls. But
Hilda has no human feeling at all.”
“Della Rocca did not think so,” said the Duc.
“Della Rocca was in love,” said Madame Mila, scornfully, “with the beaux
yeaux de sa cassette too, as well. They may only have quarreled, you
know. Hilda is very disagreeable and difficult. By the way, Deutschland
went after her to Rome, and proposed to her again.”
“Indeed! and she refused him again?”
“Oh, yes. She refuses them all. I did fancy she was touched by Della
Rocca, but, you see, it came to nothing; she is as cold as a crystal. She
likes to know that heaps of men are wretched about her, and she likes to
study those dingy old paintings, and that is all she does like, or ever
will like. She will be very unhappy as she grows older, and I dare say
she will be quite capable of leaving all her money away from her family
to build a cathedral or found a School of Art.”
And Madame Mila, impatient, nodded to the Duc, and dashed away in the
victoria behind the white-and-black liveries. She was managing to enjoy
her Lent after all; her mind being at rest about those sixty thousand
francs, there was no occasion to be so very rigid; low bodices she did
not wear, because she was a woman of her word; but then she had half a
hundred divine confections, cut square, or adorned with ruffs, or open en
cœur, with loveliest lace and big bouquets of roses, to make that form of
renunciation simpler; there was plenty going on, and little “sauteries,”
which nobody would call balls, and pleasant gatherings, quite harmless,
because only summoned for “music,” and altogether, what with the oasis
of Carême, and the prolongation of the Carnival in Russian houses, life
was very endurable; and there were Neapolitan oysters to fast upon
comfortably. Heaven tempers the wind to the shorn lamb; and it would be
hard if society did not soften penitence to the Femme Galante.
The Lady Hilda did keep her Lent, and kept it strictly, and was never
seen at the sauteries, and rarely at the musical parties. But then every
one knew that she was _dévote_ (when she was not slightly Voltairean),
and it could not be expected that a woman going to reign in the vast
world of London would put herself out to be amiable in Floralia. Yet,
had they only known it, she loved Floralia in her own heart, as she had
never loved any other place upon earth. The beautiful small city set
along its shining waters, with all the grace of its classic descent, its
repose of contemplative art, its sanctity of imperishable greatness, had
a hold upon her that no other spot under the sun could ever gain. If she
thought others unworthy of it, she thought herself no less unworthy. It
seemed to her that to be worthy to dwell in it, one needed to be wise and
pure and half divine, even as St. Ursula herself.
And all the pride in her was shaken to the roots: she was full of a
restless, dissatisfied humility; there were times when she hated herself
and was weary of herself to utter impatience. She shut herself up with
her art studies and the old frescoes, because they pained her less than
any other thing. She was passionately unhappy: though to other people she
only seemed a trifle more cynical and more contemptuous than before,—no
more.
The easy morality with which her cousin would have solved all difficulty
was not possible to her. She would not have cheated the old dead man from
whom her riches came, by evading him in the spirit of his will whilst
adhering to the letter. Unless she gave up her riches, her lover could
be nothing to her; and the thought of giving them up never even occurred
to her as possible. She did not know it, because she was so very tired
of so many things; but the great world she had always lived in was very
necessary to her, and had absolute dominion over her; it became tiresome,
as the trammels of empire do to a monarch; but to lay down her sceptre
would have been an abdication, and an abnegation impossible to her.
And she despised herself because they were impossible; despised herself
because to his generosity she had only responded with what at best was
but a vulgar egotism; despised herself because she had been so weak that
she had permitted his familiarities and his caresses unrebuked; despised
herself for everything with that self-scorn of a proud woman, which is
far more intense and bitter than any scorn that she has ever dealt out
upon others.
She had lived all her life on a height of unconscious, but no less
absorbing, self-admiration. She had looked down on all the aims and
objects and attainments and possessions of all other persons with a
bland and superb vanity; she had been accustomed to regard herself as
perfect, as others all united to tell her that she was; and her immunity
from mean frailties and puerile emotions had given her a belief that she
was lifted high above the passions and the follies of humankind; now,
all of a sudden, she had dropped to the lowest depths of weakness and
of selfishness; passion had touched her, yet had left her without its
courage.
In those long, lonely, studious days in Lent, studying her religious
art with wandering thoughts, she grew to hate herself; yet to resign
her empire for another’s sake never even distantly appeared to her as
possible.
One day, in a little private chapel, where there were some fine dim
workes en tempera, only to be seen by earliest morning light, she was
startled by seeing him near her. He was coming from the sacristy on
business of the church. He looked at her quickly, and would have passed
on with a silent salutation, but she approached him on an impulse which
a moment later she regretted.
“Need you avoid me?” she said, hurriedly. “Surely—I go from here so
soon—we might still be friends? People would talk less——”
He looked down on her with a cold severity which chilled her like the
passing of an icy wind.
“Madame,” he answered her, with a fleeting smile, “your Northern lovers,
perhaps, may have been content to accept such a position: I am, I
confess, thankless. I thought you too proud to heed what ‘people said’;
but, if that trouble you, I go myself to Sicily to-morrow.”
Then he bowed very low once more, and, with his salutation to the altar,
went on his way through the dusky shadows of the little chapel out into
the morning sunshine of the street.
Her eyes grew blind with tears, and she sank down before a wooden bench
upon her knees; yet could not pray there, for the bitterness and the
tumult of her heart.
She found her master in him.
His passionless, unpardoning gaze sank into her very soul, and seemed
like a ruthless light, that showed her all the wretchedness of pride and
self-love and vainest ostentations, which she had harbored there and set
up as her gods.
No amorous extolling, no feverish pursuit, of her. She comprehended that
she had wronged him, and that he would not forgive. After all,—knowing
what she knew, knowing that she could never and would never marry
him,—she had had no right to deal with him as she had done. She had
allowed him to bask in the sun of a fool’s paradise, and then had
awakened him rudely and had sent him adrift. She had been ungenerous: she
saw it, and hated her own fault with the repentance of a generous temper.
She had gone through the world with but little heed for the pain of
others; but his pain smote her conscience. After all, he had a title
to upbraid her passionately; that he refrained from doing so made her
own self-reproach the keener. There had been so many moments when with
justice he might have felt certain that she loved him; and how could he
guess the rest? She knew that she had wronged him; and she was humbled
in her own sight; she had lost her own self-respect, and her own motives
seemed to her but poor, and almost base, ones.
Nothing had ever moved her so intensely as that silent condemnation, as
that contemptuous rejection of her poor half-hearted overture of peace.
He would be all, or nothing.
When she left the chapel she loved him as she had never done before; yet
it never occurred to her to abandon her riches for his sake. The habits
and the ways of the world were too close about her; its artificial needs
and imperious demands were too much her second nature; its admiration was
too necessary to her, and her custom of deference to its conventional
laws too much an instinct; she had been too long accustomed to regard the
impulses of the heart as insane follies, and poverty of life as pain and
madness.
The same evening he did leave the town for Sicily, where he had lands
which, though beautiful, were utterly unproductive, and constantly
harried by the system of brigandage, which paralyzed the district.
“Paolo will get shot most likely. He has declared that he will not return
without having captured Pibro,” said an Italian in her hearing, at a
musical gathering, dedicated to the music of Pergolese.
Pibro was a notorious Sicilian robber. The sweet chords sounded very
harsh and jangled in her ears; she left early, and went home and took a
heavy dose of chloral, which only gave her dark and dreary dreams.
“What miserable creatures we are!” she thought, wearily. “We cannot even
sleep naturally: poor people can sleep; they lie on hard benches, and
dream with smiles on their faces.”
She got up, and looked out at the moonlight on the river, and walked to
and fro in her chamber, with the great braids of her hair flying over
her shoulders,—a lofty, slender, white figure in the pale gleam of the
lamp-rays.
A passionate, feverish, disordered pain consumed her. It terrified her.
Would it be thus weeks, months, years,—all her life?
“Perhaps it is the chloral that unnerves one,” she thought. “I will not
take it any more.”
“Only fancy, ma chère,” said Madame Mila to her next morning, with the
pretty cat-like cruelty of the Mila species, “only fancy,—that poor
dear Della Rocca is gone to his death in Sicily! So they say. There is
a horrid brigand who has been swinging some of his farmers there to
trees, and burning their cottages,—Della Rocca’s farmers, you know; and
he is gone to see about it, and to capture the wretched creature, as
if he could when all the soldiers and all the police have failed! He
will be quite certain to be shot. Isn’t it a pity? He is so handsome,
and if he would marry that little American Spiffler girl with all her
millions he might be very happy. That little Spiffler is really not
unpresentable,—rather _mignonne_, don’t you think?—and her people will
give the largest _dot_ ever heard of in Europe if they can get one of
the very old titles: and she is only seventeen: he might send her to the
Sacré Cœur for a year or two.”
“If he be gone to be shot, what use would the Spiffler _dot_ be?” said
Lady Hilda, with the coolest calm, as on a subject not even of most
remote interest; and she went on glazing a corner of the draperies of her
St. Ursula with carmine.
“The Spiffler marriage was proposed to him,” continued Madame Mila,
unheeding. “The Featherleighs undertook it, but he refused point blank.
‘_Je ne me vends pas_,’ was all he said. It was very rude, and really
that little Spiffler might be made something of; those very tiny
creatures never look vulgar, and are so easy to dress; as it is, I dare
say Furstenberg will take her; it is on the tapis, and Della Rocca won’t
come back alive, I suppose—isn’t it a hare-brained thing to do?—there
are gendarmes to look after the brigands, but it seems he has some fancy
because they were his own people that suffered—but no doubt he told you
all about it, as you and he are such friends?”
“He merely said he was going to Sicily,” said the Lady Hilda, languidly,
still glazing her St. Ursula.
Madame Mila eyed her curiously.
“You look very pale, dear; I think you paint too much, and read too
much,” she said, affectionately. “I wish you had tried to persuade him
into this Spiffler affair; it would be just the marriage for him, and a
girl of seventeen may be drilled into anything, especially when she has
small bones and little color and good teeth; if Furstenberg gets her he
will soon train her into good form,—only he will gamble away all her
money, let them tie it up as they may; and they can’t tie it up very much
if they want to make a high marriage. Good men won’t sacrifice themselves
unless they get some control of the fortune. They wouldn’t have tied it
at all with Della Rocca. Wouldn’t the little Spiffler have been better
for him than Sicily?”
“It depends upon taste,” said the Lady Hilda, changing her brushes.
“Very odd taste,” said Madame Mila. “They say Pibro always cuts the
heads off the men he takes, and sends them into Palermo—the heads, you
know—with lemons in their mouths, like boars. Isn’t it horrible? And
Della Rocca intends going up after the monster in his very fastnesses
upon the mountains! Fancy that beautiful head of his!—— Really, dear, you
do look very ill: when will you go to London?”
“Oh, some time next week.”
She went to the window and opened it; the room swam round her, the sounds
of the streets grew dull upon her ears.
“I wish you wouldn’t go till after the races,” said Madame Mila,
placidly. “I mean to stay. The place is really very nice, though one does
see the same people too often. Fancy poor Paolo ending like John the
Baptist,—the head in the charger, you know. I wonder you let him go,
for you had a great deal of influence over him; and, say what you like,
the Spiffler girl would have been better. How can you keep that window
open, with the tramontana blowing?—thanks so much for lending me the
horses——Goodness! what is the matter.”
Madame Mila paused, frightened; for the first time in all her life, Lady
Hilda, leaning against the strong north wind, had lost her consciousness
and had fainted.
“How very strange people are!” thought Madame Mila, when an hour later
her cousin had recovered herself, and had attributed her weakness to
the chloral at night and the scent of her oil paints. “If she cared for
him like that, why didn’t she keep him when she had got him?—she might
have hung him to her skirt like her châtelaine; nobody would ever have
said anything. I do begin to think that, with all her taste, and all her
cleverness, she has after all not so very much savoir-faire.”
No one had much savoir-faire to Madame Mila’s mind who did not manage
always to enjoy themselves without scruples and also without scenes.
The house in London was ordered to be kept ready night and day, but no
one went to occupy it. M. Camille Odissôt, stimulated by dread of his
patroness’s daily arrival in Paris, worked marvels of celerity upon the
ball-room walls, and drew with most exquisite precision bands of Greek
youths and maidens in the linked mazes of the dance, but none went to
admire his efforts and execution. No fashionable newspapers announced the
Lady Hilda’s arrival in either city; she stayed on and on in Floralia.
“When I know that he is safe out of Sicily I will go,” she said to
herself, and let the piles of letters and invitation-cards lie and
accumulate as they would.
She ceased to paint, and left the St. Ursula unfinished: he had sketched
it out for her on the panel, and had first tinted it en grisaille. She
had not the courage to go on with it; she changed her mode of life, and
rode or drove all the day long in the sweet fresh spring weather. When
she was not in the open air she felt suffocated. The danger which he ran
was no mere exaggeration of her cousin’s malicious inventiveness, but was
a fact, true and ghastly enough; no one heard of or from him, but his
friends said that it was the most fatal madness that had led him to risk
his life in the fastnesses of the Sicilian thieves.
“It is sheer suicide,” they said around her. “What had he to do there?—if
the law cannot enforce itself, leave it alone in its impotency. But
he had some idea that because his own villagers were among those who
suffered most, it was his place to go there and do what the law cannot
do:—he was always Quixotic, poor Paolo.”
She went out into society as Easter came, and heard all that they said,
and gave no sign of what she suffered. Worth sent her new marvels of
the spring, and she wore them, and was endlessly courted and envied and
quoted and wondered at. She was a little chillier and more cynical than
ever, and women observed with pleasure that she was looking ill and
growing too thin, which would spoil her beauty. That was all. But she had
never thought such pain possible in life as she endured now.
“If he die it is I who will have killed him,” she said in her own heart
night and day.
Once she found herself in her long lonely rides near Palestrina,
and met the old steward, and recognized him, and went into the sad,
silent, deserted house, and listened to the old man’s stories of his
beloved lord’s boyhood and manhood, and of the people’s clinging feudal
attachment to him, and of his devotion to them in the time of the cholera
pestilence.
“There is not an old charcoal-burner or a little goatherd on the estates
that would not give his life for Prince Paolo,” the steward said to her,
crying like a child because there was no news from Sicily.
The same evening she went to a great Pasqua ball at the Roubleskoff
villa. As they fastened the diamonds over her hair and in her bosom,
she felt to hate the shining, senseless, soulless stones: they were the
emblem of the things for which she had lost him; and at that very hour,
for aught they knew, he might be lying dead on some solitary shore by the
fair blue sea of Theocritus!
With a heart sick with terror and uncertainty, she went to the brilliant
crowds of the Russian house,—to the talk that was so frivolous and
tedious, to the dances she never joined in, to the homage she was so
tired of, to the monotonies and personalities and trivialities that make
up society.
M. de St. Louis hurried up to her:
“Madame, quelle chance!—our new Herakles has slain his Dragon. Maremma
has just had telegrams from Palermo. Della Rocca has positively captured
the brigand Pibro, and taken him into the city, much wounded, but alive,
and in the king’s jail by this time. A fine thing to have done, is it
not? Of course we shall all praise it, since it has succeeded; although,
in truth, a madder exploit never was attempted. Paolo was ten days in the
mountains, living on a few beans and berries: he has received no hurt
whatever; I should think they will give him the Grand Cross of Italy. It
is really a superb thing to have done. The monster has been the terror
of that district for ten years. Palermo went utterly mad with joy. It is
quite a pity there is no Ariosto to celebrate such a feat. It is very
Ariosto-like. Indeed, all the best Italians are so. Englishmen have long
ceased to be in any manner Shakspearian; but Italians remain like their
poets.”
The Duc wandered away into the subtlest and most discursive analysis
of the Ariostan school and of the national characteristics which it
displayed and was nurtured on; but she had no ear to hear it.
Outwardly she sat indifferent and calm, but her brain and her heart
were in tumult with the sweetest, loftiest, grandest pride that she had
ever known,—pride without egotism, without vanity, without a thought
of self; true pride, exultant in heroism, not the arrogant pride of
self-culture, of self-worship, of self-love, not the paltry pride of rank
and acquisition and physical perfection, not the pride of which all the
while she had been half contemptuous herself. And then—his life was safe!
Yet, had he stood before her then she must have given him the same
answer: at least, she thought so.
“What a fine thing to have done!” said Madame Mila, pausing by her in the
middle of a waltz, with her brocade train ablaze with gold. “And now he
can come back and marry the Spiffler girl. What do you say, Duc?”
“He will never marry la petite Spiffler,” said the Duc, “nor any one
else,” with a glance of meaning at Lady Hilda.
All eyes turned upon her. She played idly with her fan,—one painted long
ago by Watteau.
“M. della Rocca has succeeded, so it is heroism,” she said, calmly. “Had
he failed, I suppose it would have been foolhardiness.”
“Of course,” said the Duc. “Surely, madame, Failure cannot expect to use
the same dictionary as Success?”
“He must have the Grand Cordon, and marry the big Spiffler _dot_,” said
Madame Mila.
The Duc smiled.
“Nay, Comtesse, that were bathos indeed. Anyhow, let us rejoice that he
is living, and that the old Latin race is still productive of heroes. I
suppose we shall have details the day after to-morrow.”
“What ever could he do it for?” said Madame Mila, as she whirled away
again in the encircling arm of her Maurice: to Madame Mila such trifles
as duty, patriotism, or self-sacrifice could not possibly be any motive
power among rational creatures. “What ever could he do it for?—I suppose
to soften Hilda. But he must know very little about her: she hates
anything romantic; you heard she called it foolhardy. He _never_ will be
anything to her, not if he try for ten years. She cares about him after
her fashion, but she cares much more about herself.”
Lady Hilda did not sleep that night.
She did not even lie down; dry-eyed and with fever in her veins, she sat
by the window, watching the bright pale gold of the morning widen over
the skies, and the sea-green depths of the river catch the first sun rays
and mirror them.
She was so proud of him,—ah, heaven, so proud! The courage of her
temper answered to the courage of his action. It was Heraklean,—it was
Homeric,—that going forth single-handed to do what the law could not or
would not do, and set free from tyranny of brute force those poor tillers
of the soil who could not help themselves. The very folly and madness of
that utter disregard of peril moved her to reverence,—she who had all
her life been environed with the cool, calm, cautious, and circumspect
customs of the world.
For one moment it seemed to her possible to renounce everything for
his sake. For one moment her own passion for the mere gauds and pomps
and possessions of the world looked to her beside the simplicity and
self-sacrifice of his own life so poor and mean that she shrank from it
in disgust. For one moment she said to herself, “Love was enough.”
He had been ready to give up his life for a few poor laborers, who had no
other claim on him than that they lived upon the soil he owned; and she
who loved him had not the courage to renounce mere worldly riches for his
sake. She hated herself, and yet she could not change herself. She cared
for power, for supremacy, for indulgence, for extravagance; she thought
she heard the tittering mockery of the women she had eclipsed so long at
all her present weakness; it was all so poor, so base, so unworthy, yet
it enchained her: the world had been her religion; no one casts off a
creed long held without hard and cruel strife.
“Oh, my love, how far beneath you I am!” she thought, she whose pride had
been a by-word, and whose superb vanity had been an invulnerable armor.
She could have kneeled down and kissed his hands for very humility; yet
she could not resolve to yield.
“I might see him once more, before I go,” she thought, and so, coward
like, she put the hour of decision from her. They must part, but she
might see him once more first.
She would go away, of course, and her life in the winter city would be
with the things of the past, and she would grow used to the pain of dead
passion, and feel it less with time. Other women did, and why not she?
So she said to herself; and yet at moments a sort of despair appalled
her: what would her future be? Only one long empty void, in whose
hollowness the “pleasures” of the world would rattle like dead bones. She
began to understand that for a great love there is no death possible. It
is like Ahasuerus the Jew: it must live on in torment forever.
And how she had smiled at all these things when others had spoken of them!
The days passed slowly one by one; the beautiful city was in its spring
glory, and ran over with the blossoms of flowers, as though it were the
casket that Persephone let fall. The news-sheets were full of this deed
which he had done in Sicily; she bought them all, down to the tawdriest
little sheet that held his name, and read the well-known story again and
again a hundred and ten hundred times. His friends expected him to arrive
in the town each day, but no one heard anything direct from himself.
“It is strange he writes to none of us,” said Maremma. “Can anything have
happened?”
“Oh, no; the papers would know it,” said the Duc de St. Louis.
She overheard them, and listened with dry lips and a beating heart.
Why did he write to no one? The news-sheets had announced that he had
left Palermo for Floralia.
“He may be coming back by the marshes,” some one else suggested: “he is
reclaiming land there.”
Perhaps he stayed away, she thought, because he had heard that she still
remained in his native city.
It was mid April.
Madame Mila was organizing picnics under old Etrurian walls, and _al
fresco_ dinners in villa gardens, and she and her kind were driving out
on the tops of drags and playing baccarat upon anemone-studded lawns by
moonlight, and driving in again at or after midnight, singing Offenbach
choruses, and going to the big café in the town for supper and champagne.
Be it in winter or summer, spring or autumn, town or country, youth or
middle age, Madame Mila and her kind contrive to make no difference in
their manner of life whatever: they would sing Schneider’s songs in the
Tombs of the Prophets, they would eat lobster salad on Mount Olivet, and
they would scatter their cigar-ash over Vaucluse, Marathon, the Campo
Santo, or the grave at Ravenna with equal indifference; they are always
amused, and defy alike the seasons and the sanctities to stop them in
their amusement.
It was mid April, and with the beginning of May would come the races, and
with the races the Winter City would become the Summer City; and then the
winter fashion always fled with one bound to fresh fields and pastures
new, and left the town to silence, sunshine, roses, fruits, its own
populace with their summer songs and summer skies, and perhaps here and
there an artist or a poet, or some such foolish person, who loved it best
so in its solitude.
“Do come with us, Hilda,” said Madame Mila, one mid-April morning.
Madame Mila was attired in the simplest morning costume of cream-hued
sicilienne covered with écru lace, and she had a simple country Dorothy
hat of cream-colored velvet, lined _bleu-de-ciel_, with wreaths of
delicate nemophilæ and convolvuli and floating feathers, set on one side
of her head; Lancret might have painted her on a fan, or Fragonard on a
cabinet; she was just going to drive out with five carriages full of her
friends to a picnic at Guido Salvareo’s villa; they were to dine there,
play lansquenet there, and come back in the small hours; they had all
postillons, _de Lonjumeau_, powdered, and with ribboned straw hats; the
horses were belled, and the bells were jingling in the street; Madame
Mila was in the most radiant spirits; she had won five hundred napoleons
the night before, and had them all to adventure over again to-night.
“Do come with us, Hilda,” she urged. “You do nothing but go those stupid
long drives by yourself; it is very bad for you; and it will be charming
to-day; Salvareo has such taste; it is really quite romantic to sit upon
those anemones, and have the goats come and stare at you; and he always
does things so well, and his cook is so good. Do come with us; I am sure
it would do you good.”
Lady Hilda looked up from the St. Ursula, which she was finishing:
“My dear Mila, you know perfectly well how I detest that kind of thing.
Teresa’s songs, drag-seats, and eager efforts to imitate the worst kind
of women!—go to it, if it amuse you; but, with all gratitude, allow me to
decline.”
“How disagreeable you are!” said Madame Mila, pettishly. “One must do
something with oneself all these long days. If it were Palestrina, I
suppose you would go.”
Lady Hilda deigned to give no reply. She touched in the gold background
of her saint. Madame Mila looked at her with irritation: no one likes to
be despised, and she knew that her cousin did very nearly despise her,
and all the ways and means of enjoyment in which her heart delighted.
Lady Hilda, tranquilly painting there, annoyed her inexpressibly.
Why should any woman be above the box-seats of drags, and all their
concomitant attractions?
She took her revenge.
“Do as you like, of course; but you always _do_ do that,” she said,
carelessly. “There are two seats vacant. St. Louis and Carlo Maremma were
to have gone with us, but they went to Della Rocca instead. Oh, didn’t
you know it?—he reached Palestrina two days ago, very ill with marsh
fever. It is fever and cholera and ague and all sorts of dreadful things
together. Isn’t it odd?—to have escaped all that danger in Sicily, and
then get this in the swamps coming back? Nobody knew it till late last
night, when his steward got frightened and sent in for the physicians. He
is very bad, I believe,—not likely to live. You know they go down under
that—sometimes—in twenty-four hours.”
Lady Hilda seemed to reach her at a single step, though the distance of
the room was between them.
“Is that true?—or is it some jest?”
Madame Mila, appalled, looked up into her face.
“It is true,—quite true. Oh, Hilda, take your hand off! you hurt me. How
could I tell you would care about it like that?”
“Is it true?” muttered her cousin, again.
“Indeed, indeed it is,” she whimpered, trembling. “Oh, let me go; you
spoil my lace. If you cared for the man like that, why didn’t you keep
him when you had got him? I know you could not have married him; but
nobody would have said anything.”
Lady Hilda put her out into the corridor, and closed the door and locked
it within.
Madame Mila, frightened, astonished, and outraged, went down to her
Maurice, and the drag, and the ribboned and powdered postillons, and the
horses with their jingling bells and plaited tails; the gay cavalcade
rattled off along the river-street towards the city gates as the clocks
tolled three.
Lady Hilda and St. Ursula were left alone.
Within less than half an hour the black horses were harnessed and bore
their mistress towards Palestrina. Never before moved by impulse, impulse
alone governed her now,—the impulse of despair and remorse. She cared
nothing who saw her or who knew; for once she had forgotten herself.
The long drive seemed eternity; she thought the steep winding mountain
roads would never end; when Palestrina came in sight, pale and stately
against its dark background of forest trees, she felt as if her heart
would break. He had gone through all those perils afar off, only to be
dying there!
It was five o’clock by the convent chimes when they reached the crest of
the hill on which the old place stood. The lovely hill-side was covered
with the blue and white of the wild hyacinths and gold of the wild
daffodils. The lofty stone pines spread their dark-green roofs above
her head. Flocks of birds were singing, in the myrtle thickets, their
sweet shrill evensong. The shining valley lay below like a cloud of
amber light. The surpassing loveliness, the intense stillness of it all
made the anguish within her unbearable. What she had missed all her life
long!——
There was a chapel not far from the house, set in the midst of the pines,
with the cross on its summit touching the branches, and its door-way
still hung round with the evergreens and flowers of its passed Easter
feasts. There were men and women and children standing about on the turf
in front of it; they were most of them crying bitterly.
She stopped her horses there, and called a woman to her, but her lips
would not frame any question. The woman guessed it.
“Yes, my beautiful lady,” she said, with many tears. “We have been
praying for Prince Paolo. He is very ill, up yonder. The marsh-sickness
has got him. May the dear Mother of God save him to us! But he is dying,
they say——”
“We would die in his stead, if the good angels would let us,” said one of
the men, drawing near: the others sobbed aloud.
She put out her hand to the man,—the slender proud hand that she had
refused to princes. Wondering, he fell on his knee and would have kissed
her hand. She drew back in horror.
“Do not kneel to me! I have killed him!” she muttered; and she urged her
panting horses forward to the house.
She bade them tell the Duc de St. Louis to come to her upon the
terrace. She leaned there tearless, white as death, still as marble,
the beautiful, tranquil springtime all around, and the valley shining
like gold in the light of the descending sun. It seemed to her that ages
passed before the soft step of her old friend sounded near her: he was
surprised and startled, but he did not show it.
“There is still hope,” he hastened to say, ere she could speak. “Within
the last hour he is slightly better: they give him quinine constantly. If
the chills and shivering do not return, it is just possible that he may
live. But——”
His voice faltered in its serenity, and he turned his head away.
“It is not likely?”
Her own voice had scarcely any sound of its natural tone left in it, yet
long habit was so strong with her that she spoke calmly.
“It is not likely. This deadly marsh-poison is short and fierce. After
the fatigue and fasting in Sicily it has taken fearful hold on him. But
in an hour or two they will know,—one way or the other.”
“I will stay here. Come and tell me,—often. And if—if the worst come,—let
me see him. Leave me now.”
He looked at her, hesitated, then left her as she asked. He guessed all
that passed in her thoughts, all that had gone before; and he knew that
she was not a woman who would bear pity, and that she was best left thus
in solitude.
Like a caged animal she paced to and fro the long length of the stone
terrace.
She was all alone.
The golden radiance of the declining day shone everywhere around, the
birds sang, the dreamy bells rang in the Ave Maria from hill to hill, all
was so still, so peaceful, so beautiful; yet, with the setting of the
sun, his life might go out in darkness.
In her great misery, her soul was purified. The fire that consumed her
burned away the dross of the world, the alloy of selfishness and habit
and vain passions. “Oh, heaven! give me his life, and I will give him
mine!” she cried in her heart, all through those terrible hours, and yet
recoiled in terror from the uselessness and daring of her prayer. What
had she ever done, that she could merit its fulfillment?
He might have been hers, all hers; and she had loved the base things of
a worldly greatness better than himself. And now he lay dying there, as
the sun dropped westward and night came.
She felt no chill of evening. She felt neither hunger nor thirst. Crowds
of weeping people hung about in the gardens below. She heard nothing that
passed round her, save the few words of her old friend when from time to
time he came and told her that there was no change.
The moon rose, and its light fell on the stone of the terrace, and
through the vast deserted chambers opening from it,—on the gray worn
marbles of the statues, and on the pale angels of the frescoes.
It was nine o’clock: the chimes of the convent above on the mountains
told every hour. Unceasingly she paced to and fro, to and fro, like some
mad or wounded creature. The silence and serenity of the night, the
balmy fragrance of it, and the silvery light, were so much mockery of
her wretchedness. She had never thought that there could be agony like
this——and yet from God no sign.
Nearly another hour had passed before her friend approached her again.
She caught the sound of his step in the darkness; her heart stood still;
her blood was changed to ice, frozen with the deadliness of the most
deadly fear on earth; she could only look at him with wide-opened,
strained, blind eyes.
For the first time, he smiled.
“Take comfort,” he said, softly. “He has fallen asleep; he is less
exhausted; they say that he may live. How cold you are!—this night will
kill you.”
She fell upon her knees on the stone pavement, and all her bowed frame
was shaken by convulsive weeping.
He drew aside in reverence, and left her alone in the light of the moon.
When midnight came, hope was certain.
The sleep still lasted; the fever had abated, the cold chills had not
returned.
She called her old friend to her out into the terrace.
“I will go now. Send to me at daybreak; and keep my secret.”
“May I tell him nothing?”
“Tell him to come to me,—when he is able.”
“Nothing more?”
“No; nothing. He will know——”
“But——”
She turned her face to him in the full moonlight, with the tears of her
joy coursing down her cheeks, and he started at the change in her that
this one night of suffering had wrought.
“No, say nothing more. But—but—you shall see what my atonement shall be,
and my thankfulness.”
Then she went away from him softly in the darkness and the fragrance of
the April night. The Duc looked after the lights of her carriage with a
mist over his own eyes, but he shrugged his shoulders with a sigh.
“Who can ever say that he knows a woman? Who can ever predict what she
will not say or will not do or will not be?” he murmured, as he turned
and went within to watch beside the bed of his friend, as the stars grew
clearer and the dawn approached.