ANTICIPATION
It is a mistake to suppose that it is the manly qualities in a man
which invariably appeal most to women’s affections. Very often,
indeed, it is their exact antitheses--indecision, dependence,
helplessness--which excite in tender breasts the fondest response.
Paradoxically, every woman is a mother before she is a virgin, else,
save in foretasting the guerdon of love, could she never suffer the
ordeal which is to qualify her for that reward. She becomes a mother
by right of the test to which she has submitted, which is in truth the
test of her capacity for cherishing the weakling, for nourishing, for
protecting and for sympathising in all ways with its weakness.
Wherefore, as she is the instinctive nurse of frailty, her affections
turn more naturally to it than to the strength which is independent of
her.
There are women, of course, who would always rather be coerced by a
brutal husband than consulted by an irresolute one. There are women,
also, of the manly, tailor-made type, to whom a sick dog or horse
appeals with fifty times the force of an ailing child. But I make bold
to think that they are in the minority, and that the mass of the sex
is inclined to be attracted more by the weak than by the strong
qualities in men. For weakness may be lovable, while strength is only
admirable; and a woman defrauded in her helpful instinct is a woman
deprived of her essential meaning.
If I have made it appear that Tiretta was a masterful character, I
have sketched his portrait awry, and must revise it. He was, in truth,
in many ways an entirely weak creature, impressionable, emotional, and
lacking the first quality of decision. One sees how he had been
persuaded to dance attendance on Fortune, lingering on in her
ante-room in the vain hopes of that summons to her presence which a
more resolute soul would have enforced. One sees how inconsistent he
could be to his own self-sacrifices, when their fruits seemed to him
to be unjustifiably delayed. He was full of passionate impulses and
impotent remorses--a man in courage, a woman in regrets. Yet he had
two qualities which were enough to redeem him utterly in all eyes that
were truly feminine, and those were charm and lovableness. He was
above all things lovable, and by virtue of that disposition alone
might easily have captured and absorbed into his own a more guileful
heart than that of the simple, affectionate child in whose soft bosom
he had awakened the unconscious instincts of motherhood. Isabella
startled to the knowledge of his reappearance with the mad rapture of
a mother receiving back her long-lost child.
Now all would be well, her fluttering, unreasoning heart assured her;
now all would be well, her illogical sex proclaimed. She could think
of nothing but that he had returned, that the long, long days of doubt
and anguish were ended, that the good reasons he had had for imposing
them on her would be made lovingly clear. All the sorrows, the
remorses, the dutiful resolutions of the past drear months took wing
in a moment like doleful crows. For that, no doubt, her cruel
disillusionment about her father was part to blame. Yet, all said,
love, without question, would have had its way with her in the end.
She had not the power to resist so dear an importunate; she was swayed
in all things by affection, and she had no one trustworthy weapon in
her soul’s armoury to oppose to it.
He had come back to her because he needed her--because they could not
survive apart. To realise that was to forget all else--the danger once
implied in her father’s half-veiled threats; Fanchette’s assurances
that a certain one must sooner or later come to be convinced, and
resigned to the thought, of his own impotence; the terror she herself
had had that she had been cast off by him because she had been found
wanting in the crucial test. If that had been so, his masculine
resolution had been no proof against his need of her; and in
proportion as he needed her his weakness was a thing for transport. It
is characteristic of the needs of lovers that they appear insensible
to the fear of, or the reasonable consideration for, any obligations
whatsoever outside their own. Very dimly the thought of her engagement
shadowed Isabella’s mind; it seemed like an illusion that change of
circumstance had already half dissipated; she had a vague feeling
that, were reference to the fact to be craftily avoided, the fact
itself would gradually be overlooked and forgotten. She was like a
punished child, dismissed back to her play, bearing, with the infinite
pathos of childhood, no grudge against her unjust judges, happy only
to be forgiven and thought no more about, while she revelled in the
sunshine from which she had been so long debarred. She was
happy--happy; laughter frolic’d in her eyes; a bird sang in her
breast. She did not know how her crown of bliss was to realise itself;
only somehow he would find a way; she was to see him, hear him, be
loved by him once more.
All night her heart went dancing; it danced on to the joy of the
morning, and awoke as if to a sense of wild reprieve. She kept her
secret to herself--the secret of her knowledge of his return--but its
fumes were in her brain, and she could not altogether hide the
exhilaration they caused there. Fanchette, attending to her Highness’s
toilette, was in a curiously silent mood--morose even, and
uncommunicative. Her mistress sought, by every merry art, to coax the
girl into a response to her own bright spirits. She laughed at and
rallied her, she overflowed with kindness, she would not be denied for
all the icy rebuffs she encountered. But without much avail, it
seemed. In truth the camériste, perplexed and a little
conscience-haunted, was in the last temper for welcoming such
approaches. She could have wished rather for affront, impatience,
inconsiderateness--anything that would have appeared to justify her in
offence, to provoke her to retaliation. But this unassailable
sweetness was so disarming that for the moment it confounded her.
In the afternoon she accompanied her mistress to Colorno; and, there
in the carriage, urgency at last lent her desperation. She stiffened
herself, and spoke:
“You are glad to be returning, mademoiselle?”
“O, how glad, Fanchette!”
To Colorno, with its unutterable memories; to paradise regained; to
the gardens where the wild love-flower grew, which his lips, and hers,
had kissed! That she was bidden on her way thither seemed like a tacit
surrender by authority to the inevitable. It must have known what
associations that restoration would awake.
All the journey hitherto she had lain back in a blissful trance,
listening to the ponderous rolling of the wheels as they gathered up
the reluctant miles, incessantly framing in her mind a picture of the
reunion that was to be, with its joys, its tender reproaches, its
loving reassurances. The past was to be resumed, as if no black winter
of separation had ever interposed. And spring was coming--spring with
its wakening birds, and the blossoms breaking in its orange-groves.
Smiling, she looked at the faithful little basil-pot by her side, and
secretly caressed its leaves, now long recovered from the neglect to
which she had once in her cruelty committed them. She would have bent
and kissed them but for Fanchette.
The maid, setting her lips resolutely, did not answer for awhile.
“Then, _I_ am not,” she said suddenly.
Isabella glanced at her, a little surprised.
“You do not like the country, Fanchette?”
“O! as for that,” said the girl, “the value of a place to me is the
value of its company.”
“Well, you will have plenty in a little while.”
“Plenty, and to spare,” said Fanchette, drily.
“What do you mean, child?”
“I foresee just one too many for my peace of mind, that is all.”
“One! What one?”
“Cannot your Highness guess? Yet I saw very well that I was not the
only one of us two to make note of somebody’s reappearance in Parma
yesterday.”
Isabella gave a little gasp; but subterfuge was impossible to her.
Only she sat silent, and breathing quickly, for a few moments.
“Well,” she said presently, with difficulty: “what if you were not? I
do not see how your peace of mind is affected by M. Tiretta’s return.”
“Hush, I implore your Highness!” said Fanchette. “I would not betray
the poor man, whatever distress his persistence may cause me. Possibly
your Highness may have observed the recklessness of the act which
brought us for that one instant together. I shuddered, I can tell you,
for his safety--and it was all that he might whisper to me to meet him
later on the Mezzo bridge.”
“And you met him?” There was soft eagerness, a restrained rapture, but
no least suspicion in the fervid tone. Fanchette shrugged her
shoulders perceptibly.
“What would you! One in the last extremity must take a bull by the
horns. It is safer, at least, than to run away from him. Yes, I met
him, mademoiselle.” She hardened herself to the passionate entreaty of
the eyes, of the lips that mutely questioned her. “He had in truth,”
she said, “been to the wars; and now, taking advantage of a truce, had
come back like a roaring devil to renew his assault upon me.”
“To renew--what?”
“O, mademoiselle! I would have spared you; but you know you never
would believe. Be assured, nevertheless, that I was not to be so
harried from my honesty. I entreated him to release me for once and
for all from his importunities; to abstain further from compromising
me with one to whom my heart was given. Ah--bah! I might as well have
appealed to a blood-thirsty tiger. And now I shall know what
persecution to expect in this quiet place.”
Even as she ended, her voice faltered, as if in some instinctive
misgiving, and she hung her head.
And Isabella? Incredulity, amazement, indignation--in turn each
emotion flashed its light across the beautiful face, and quivered and
passed--to be succeeded by scorn: scorn so sovereign, so consuming,
that calumny, shrivelling in its overriding flame, died in an instant
on those lying lips.
“Fanchette.”
“Yes, madame?”
“Fanchette, look at me.”
The girl obeyed, caught her breath with a start, and lowered her lids.
“Look at me, I say.”
Abject already in that revelation, the maid, half-whimpering, again
essayed to lift her hang-dog eyes, and, in the very struggle to brazen
out her falsehood, collapsed and burst into tears.
“Liar!” said Isabella softly. She was wrought beyond her gentle self:
the wanton wickedness of the slander--never for one moment believed
else by her incorruptible heart--had transformed her from a Hebe into
a Megaera. “Are you not a liar?”
Fanchette, weeping hysterically, sought to gasp out an excuse:
“If I misunderstood his meaning----”
But lovely scorn swept the cowardly pretence aside:
“You misunderstood nothing. It is I who have misunderstood, who have
been blind all this time to the true character of the despicable
creature I have trusted. You vile thing, so to hire yourself out to
traduce a noble name! Who urged you to it? In whose pay are you? Tell
me, for I will know.”
She was translated, the sweet tolerant soul--stung to a passion the
more deadly by reason of the sunshine and happiness from which she had
been torn. Fanchette, completely cowed, sobbed and shivered in her
corner. She had never even guessed at the existence of these
slumbering fires, had never calculated on a faith so obstinate as to
be utterly impervious to the assaults of jealousy. She was
overwhelmed, terrified, not only by the crushing nature of the retort
upon her, but by the particular insight which it revealed.
“O,--O!” she gasped and cried: “I will tell you, mademoiselle--I will
tell you everything, if you will only give me a moment to recover.”
“You want time,” cried scorn, “to invent new lies. But you need not
hope to deceive me again. I see it all at last--the hints, the cunning
preparation of the ground, the snare you thought to lay for
unsuspecting feet. And while I was confiding in you, resting on your
sympathy, believing you my friend! O, shame upon such infamy! I will
have you whipped, tortured, unless you confess to me at once that it
was all a lie.”
Fanchette fell upon her knees in the coach with a suppressed scream.
She knew enough to know that offended Spain, in so small a matter as
the castigation of a servant, could find easy means to have its
threats fulfilled to the letter, even in the face of obvious
injustice. It would be the “question” first, and exoneration, if any,
after. She shook with terror.
“I will confess,” she cried: “O, I will confess!”
“It was a lie?”
“Yes--yes.”
The Infanta’s red lip curled.
“Who urged you to it?--tell me.”
“O, mistress!”
“Tell me, I say.”
Fanchette choked and battled for breath, writhing her fingers about
her face.
“Was it your own mean jealousy of one too noble to stoop to an
understanding of your designs upon him? In that case----”
Again the camériste, too debased in her terror for resentment, cried
out:
“No, no--mistress--listen to me: it was one--his Highness’s own
favourite--he advised it.”
“He? Who?”
Fanchette writhed.
“My father’s friend? Who? I will know.”
“M. la Coque.”
“La Coque! that painted coxcomb!” Amazed, for all her scorn, the girl
sat a moment dumbfounded. There was revealed here a knowledge, a
conspiracy, she had never suspected.
Fanchette, frantic, once she had betrayed her lover, to exonerate him,
went on half coherently:
“He--he is devoted to your Highness’s interests; he--he only wanted to
save your Highness the consequences of a fatal step. It was our
tr--true regard for your Highness that made us conspire to open your
eyes to the real character of an adventurer.”
“To open my eyes--by a wicked lie!”
Still she sat, as if stupefied; then leaned forward, strangely quiet.
“You have opened my eyes, I think. This gentleman is your paramour, is
he not?”
Fanchette was silent, hanging her head.
“Come, be bold, girl,” said the Infanta. “It is not your jealousy, is
it, but the jealousy of that small and envious nature towards a
nobility he can never reach that has bribed you to this baseness?” She
leaned back, passing a hand across her forehead as if suddenly
overcome. “That such as you,” she said, “should dare to sit in
judgment on your betters.”
Some note of weariness, of shaken emotion, may have struck upon the
acute intuitions of the culprit. She ceased crying, and, raising her
head a little, dared a breathless retort:
“Not in judgment, but in sympathy, mademoiselle, since in imitating
our betters we feel with them.”
“What is that you say?”
“No one should know better than your Highness how love intoxicates our
reason.”
Isabella gazed at the speaker with eyes in which the indignation was
slowly giving place to distress.
“Yes,” she said low.
“An intrigue is an intrigue,” said Fanchette, growing bolder as the
other wavered. “If it is wrong, we look to high example to make it
shameful to us. In the meantime one is powerless where one has given
one’s heart away.”
“No doubt the blame is less yours than his,” said Isabella
indistinctly.
“Ah!” said Fanchette--“if your Highness would only believe in the
fondness of the intentions that actuated me. But since they are
misunderstood, it is no good to dwell upon them. Only----”
“Only what, Fanchette?”
“Since our smallness, and envy, and painted coxcombry are not to your
Highness’s taste, we had best retire, and leave you to your own
devices. You will do what you will do; and I have done, in all
disinterestedness, what I could. Perhaps you will believe me that,
even while I was outraging my own feelings to try and safeguard your
reputation, I was providing alternatively for the step from which I
foresaw you would not be easily dissuaded.”
She spoke at last like an injured saint; but the venom in her heart,
over that contumelious reference to her lover, was rankling and
growing in bitter intensity as she recovered more and more her
confidence.
“What step, Fanchette?” asked Isabella faintly.
The girl shrugged her shoulders slightly.
“Into the dark--that is all I can say--except that I know where
someone is most likely to be found within the next few days.”
She knelt back, sniffing and mopping her eyes, while a silence of some
minutes prevailed; and then a sad little voice came to her:
“Who shall throw the first stone? O, Fanchette, we are all sinners
together!”