ON a warm but overcast day, at the end of the following September, a
woman, whose face was completely hidden by a thick black veil, drove
up to the boat landing of the town of Como in a hired victoria. She was
alone, but behind her followed a second carriage containing an Italian
maid and a large quantity of luggage. When the victoria stopped at
the water’s edge the woman got out slowly, and stood for a moment,
apparently looking for something. There were many boats ranged along the
quay, their white awnings thrown back, their oars resting on the painted
seats. Beside one, which was larger than the others, soberly decorated
in brown with touches of gold, and furnished with broad seats not unlike
small armchairs, stood two bold-looking Italian lads dressed in white
sailors’ suits. One of them, after staring for a brief instant at the
veiled woman, went up to her and said in Italian:
“Is the signora for Casa Felice?”
“Yes.”
The boy took off his round hat with a gallant gesture.
“The boat is here, signora.”
He led the way to the brown-and-gold craft, and helped the lady to get
into it. She sat down on one of the big seats.
“That is the luggage,” she said, speaking Italian in a low voice, and
pointing to the second carriage from which the maid was stepping. The
two boatmen hastened towards it. In a few minutes maid and luggage were
installed in a big black gondola, oared by two men standing up, and the
brown boat, with the two lads in white and the veiled woman, glided out
on the calm water.
The day was a grey dream, mystical in its colourless silence. Blue Italy
was shrouded as the woman’s face was shrouded. The speechlessness of
Nature environed her speechlessness. She was an enigma set in an enigma,
and the two rowers looked at her and at the sunless sky, and bent to
their oars gravely. A melancholy stole into their sensitive dark
faces. This new _padrona_ had already cast a shadow upon their buoyant
temperaments.
She noticed it and clasped her hands together in her lap. She was not
accustomed yet to her new _role_ in life.
The boat stole on. Como was left behind. The thickly-wooded shores of
the lake, dotted with many villas, the tall green mountains covered with
chestnut trees, framed the long, winding riband of water which was the
way to Casa Felice. There were not many other boats out. The steamer
had already started for Bellagio, and was far away near the point
where Torno nestles around its sheltered harbour. The black gondola was
quickly left behind. Its load of luggage weighed it down. The brown boat
was alone in the grey dream of the sunless autumn day.
Behind her veil Lady Holme was watching the two Italian boys, whose
lithe bodies bent to their oars, whose dark eyes were often turned
upon her with a staring scrutiny, with the morose and almost violent
expression that is the child of frustrated curiosity.
Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking,
striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever
changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations,
but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos,
grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical
solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she
could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing
Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree.
Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was
rolling round her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably
remote horizons.
Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of
the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows
inexhaustible?
She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to
sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the
gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the
frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.
Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled
a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an
under voice to keep his boy’s heart from succumbing to the spell of
melancholy. She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that
was dreamlike. At first the music was a murmur. But presently it
grew louder. She could distinguish words now and then. Once she heard
_carissima_, a moment afterwards _amore_. Then the poison in which the
tip of this last arrow had been curiously steeped began its work in
her. The quivering creature hidden within her cowered, shrank, put up
trembling hands, cried out, “I cannot endure this thing. I do not know
how to. I have never learnt the way. This is impossible for me. This is
a demand I have not the capacity to fulfil!” And, even while it cowered
and cried out, knew, “This I must endure. This demand I shall be made
to fulfil. Nothing will serve me; no outstretched hands, no wailings of
despair, no prayers, no curses even will save me. For I am the soul in
the hands of the vivisector.”
Along the lake, past the old home of La Taglioni, past the Villa Pasta
with its long garden, past little Torno with its great round oleanders
and its houses crowding to the shore, the boatman sang. Gathering
courage as his own voice dispersed his melancholy, and the warm hopes of
his youth spread their wings once more, roused by the words of love his
lips were uttering, he fearlessly sent out his song. Love in the South
was in it, love in the sun, embraces in warm scented nights, longings
in moonlight, attainment in darkness. The boy had forgotten the veiled
lady, whose shrouded face and whose silence had for a moment saddened
him. His hot, bold nature reasserted itself, the fire of his youth
blazed up again. He sang as if only the other boatman had been there and
they had seen the girls they loved among the trees upon the shore.
And the soul writhed, like an animal stretched and strapped upon the
board, to whom no anaesthetic, had been given.
Never before would it have been possible to Lady Holme to believe that
the mere sound of a word could inflict such torment upon a heart as the
sound of the word _amore_, coming from the boatman’s lips, now inflicted
upon hers. Each time it came, with its soft beauty, its languor of
sweetness--like a word reclining--it flayed her soul alive, and showed
her red, raw bareness.
Yet she did not ask the man to stop singing. Few people in the hands
of Fate ask Fate for favours. Instinct speaks in the soul and says, “Be
silent.”
The boat rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier
region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke
more plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were
more grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little
upon the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken to Casa
Felice.
Perhaps to combat the gathering gloom of Nature the boatman sang more
loudly, with the full force of his voice. But suddenly he seemed to be
struck by the singular contrast opposed to his expansive energy by the
silent figure opposite to him. A conscious look came into his face. His
voice died away abruptly. After a pause he said,
“Perhaps the signora is not fond of music?”
Lady Holme wanted to speak, but she could not. She and this bright-eyed
boy were not in the same world. That was what she felt. He did not know
it, but she knew it. And one world cannot speak through infinite space
with another.
She said nothing. The boy looked over his shoulder at his companion.
Then, in silence, they both rowed on.
And now that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the
dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude
that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which man had no
lot.
Presently, with a stroke of his right oar, the boy who had sung turned
the boat’s prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely
house confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart.
For a long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation.
The flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle
of densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards
the grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still
too far out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details
if she had seen them. Only a sort of heavy impression that this house
had a pale, haunted aspect forced itself dully upon her.
“Ecco Casa Felice, signora!” said the foremost rower, half timidly,
pointing with his brown hand.
She made an intense effort and uttered some reply. The boy was
encouraged and began to tell her about the beauties of the house, the
gardens, the chasm behind the piazza down which the waterfall rushed, to
dive beneath the house and lose itself in the lake. She tried to listen,
but she could not. The strangeness of her being alone, hidden behind
a dense veil, of her coming to such a retired house in the autumn to
remain there in utter solitude, with no object except that of being
safe from the intrusion of anyone who knew her, of being hidden from
all watching eyes that had ever looked upon her--the strangeness of it
obsessed her, was both powerful and unreal. That she should be one of
those lonely women of whom the world speaks with a lightly-contemptuous
pity seemed incredible to her. Yet what woman was lonelier than she?
The boat drew in toward the shore and she began to see the house more
plainly. It was large, and the flat facade was broken in the middle
by an open piazza with round arches and slender columns. This piazza
divided the house in two. The villa was in fact composed of two square
buildings connected together by it. From the boat, looking up, Lady
Holme saw a fierce mountain gorge rising abruptly behind the house.
Huge cypresses grew on its sides, towering above the slate roof, and she
heard the loud noise of falling water. It seemed to add to the weight of
her desolation.
The boat stopped at a flight of worn stone steps. One of the boys sprang
out and rang a bell, and presently an Italian man-servant opened a tall
iron gate set in a crumbling stone arch, and showed more stone steps
leading upward between walls covered with dripping lichen. The boat boy
came to help Lady Holme out.
For a moment she did not move. The dreamlike feeling had come upon her
with such force that her limbs refused to obey her will. The sound of
the falling water in the mountain gorge had sent her farther adrift into
the grey, unpeopled eternity, into the vague chaos. But the boy held
out his hand, took hers. The strong clasp recalled her. She got up. The
Italian man-servant preceded her up the steps into a long garden built
up high above the lake on a creeper-covered wall. To the left was the
house door. She stood still for an instant looking out over the wide
expanse of unruffled grey water. Then, putting her hand up to her veil
as if to keep it more closely over her face, she slowly went into the
house.