the real murderer was there, within a quarter of a mile of him, and yet
could not be denounced by him to justice even to save the guiltless. The
usual occupations of a week-day claimed his time, and he went through
them all with mechanical precision, but he spoke all his words as in a
dream, and the red sanded bricks of his house, the deal table, with the
black coffee and the round loaf set out on it, the stone sink at which
Candida was washing endive and cutting lettuces, the old men and women
who came and went telling their troubles garrulously and begging for
pence, the sunshine which streamed in over the threshold, the poultry
which picked up the crumbs off the floor, all these homely and familiar
things seemed unreal to him, and were seen as through a mist.
This little narrow dwelling with the black cypress shadows falling
athwart it, which had once seemed to him the abode of perfect peace, now
seemed to imprison him, till his heart failed and died within him.
In the dead of night, at the end of the week, moved by an unconquerable
impulse which had haunted him the whole seven days, he rose, and lit a
lantern and let himself out of his own door noiselessly, stealthily, as
though he were on some guilty errand, and took the sexton's spade from
the tool-house, and went across the black shadows which stretched over
the grass, towards the place where the body of Tasso Tassilo had lain
dead. In the moonlight there stood tall and straight a column of green
leaves: it was the stately Lombardy poplar, which was spared by the
hatchet, because Marca was, so far as it understood anything, loyal in
its regret for the days that were gone. Many birds which had been for
hours sound asleep in its boughs flew out with a great whirr of wings
and with chirps of terror as the footfall of Gesualdo awakened and
alarmed them. He set his lantern down on the ground, for the rays of the
moon did not penetrate as far as the deep gloom the poplars threw around
them, and began to dig. He dug some little time without success: then
his spade struck against something which shone amidst the dry clay soil;
it was the knife. He took it up with a shudder. There were dark red
spots on the steel blade. It was a narrow, slightly-curved knife about
six inches long, such a knife as every Italian of the lower classes
carries every day, and with which most Italian murders are committed.
He looked at it long. If the inanimate thing could but have spoken,
could but have told, the act which it had done!
He, kneeling on the ground, gazed at it with a sickening fascination;
then he replaced it deeper down in the ground, and with his spade
smoothed the earth with which he covered it. The soil was so dry that it
did not show much trace of having been disturbed. Gravely he returned
homeward, convinced now of the truth of the confession made to him. Some
men met him on the road, country lads driving cattle early to a distant
fair: they saluted him with respect, but laughed when they had passed
him.
What had his reverence, they wondered, been doing with a spade at this
time of night? Did he dig for treasure? There was a tradition in the
country-side of sacks of ducats which had been buried by the river to
save them from the French troops in the time of the invasion by the
First Consul.
Gesualdo, unconscious of their comments, went home, put the spade back
in the tool-house, unlocked his church, entered, and prayed long; then,
waking his sleepy _capellano_, he bade him rise and set the bell ringing
for the first mass. The man got up, grumbling because it was still quite
dark, and next day talked to his neighbors about the queer ways of his
vicar,--how he would walk all night about his room, sometimes get up and
go out in the dead of night even. He complained that his own health and
patience would soon give way. An uneasy feeling grew up in the village:
some gossips even suggested that the bishop should be spoken to in the
town; but every one was fearful of being the first to take such a step,
and no one was sure how so great a person could be approached, and the
matter remained in abeyance. But the disquietude and the antagonism
which the manner and appearance of their priest had created grew with
the growth of the year, and with it also the impression that he knew
more of the miller's assassination than he would ever say.
A horrible sense of being this man's accomplice grew also upon himself:
the bond of silence which he kept perforce with this wretch seemed to
him to make him so. His slender strength and sensitive nerves ill fitted
him to sustain so heavy a burden, so horrible a knowledge.
"It has come to chastise me because I have thought of her too often,
have been moved by her too warmly," he told himself; and his soul shrank
within him at what appeared the greatness of his own guilt.
Since receiving the confession of the carter he did not dare to seek an
interview with Generosa. He did not dare to look on her agonized eyes
and feel that he knew what could set her free and yet must never tell
it. He trembled lest in sight of the suffering of this woman, who
possessed such power to move and weaken him, he should be untrue to his
holy office, should let the secret he had to keep escape him. Like all
timid and vacillating tempers, he sought refuge in procrastination.
All unconscious of the growth of public feeling against him, and wrapped
in that absorption which comes from one dominant idea, he pursued the
routine of his parochial life, and went through all the ceremonials of
his office, hardly more conscious of what he did than the candles which
his sacristan lighted. The confession made to him haunted him night and
day. He saw it, as it were, written in letters of blood on the blank
white walls of his bedchamber, of his sacristy, of his church itself.
The murderer was there, at large, unknown to all,--at work like any
other man in the clear, sweet sunshine, talking and laughing, eating and
drinking, waking and sleeping, yet as unsuspected as a child unborn. And
all the while Generosa was in prison. There was only one chance left; if
she should be acquitted by her judges. But even then the slur and stain
of an imputed, though unproved, crime would always rest upon her and
make her future dark, her name a by-word in her birthplace. Yes, after
what her lover had said, no mere acquittal, leaving doubt and suspicion
behind it, would give her back to the light and joy of life. Every man's
hand would be against her; every child would point at her as the woman
who had been accused of the assassination of her husband.
One day he sought Falko Melegari when the latter was making up the
accounts of his stewardship at an old bureau in a deep window-embrasure
of the villa.
"You know that the date of the trial is fixed for the 10th of next
month?" he said, in a low, stifled voice.
The young man, leaning back in his wooden chair, gave a sign of assent.
"And you," said Gesualdo, with a curious expression in his eyes,--"if
they absolve her, will you have the courage to prove your own belief in
her innocence? Will you marry her when she is set free?"
The question was abrupt and unlooked for. Falko changed color: he
hesitated.
"You will not!" said Gesualdo.
"I have not said so," answered the young man, evasively. "I do not know
that she would exact it."
Exact it! Gesualdo did not know much of human nature, but he knew what
the use of that cold word implied.
"I thought you loved her! I mistook," he said, bitterly. A rosy flush
came for a moment on the wax-like pallor of his face.
Falko Melegari looked at him insolently.
"A churchman should not meddle with these things! Love her! I love
her,--yes. It ruins my life to think of her yonder. I would cut off my
right arm to save her; but to marry her if she come out absolved,--that
is another thing; one's name a by-word, one's credulity laughed at,
one's neighbors shy of one,--that is another thing, I say. It will not
be enough for her judges to acquit her; that will not prove her
innocence to all the people here, or to my people at home in my own
country."
He rose and pushed his heavy chair away impatiently: he was ashamed of
his own words, but in the most impetuous Italian natures prudence and
self-love are always the strongest instincts. Gesualdo looked at him
with a great scorn in the depths of his dark, deep, luminous eyes. This
handsome and virile lover seemed to him a very poor creature, a coward
and faithless.
"In the depths of your soul you doubt her yourself!" he said, with
severity and contempt, as he turned away from the writing-table and went
out through the windows into the garden beyond.
"No, as God lives, I do not doubt her," cried Falko Melegari. "Not for
an hour, not for a moment. But to make others believe,--that is more
difficult. I will maintain her and befriend her always if they set her
free; but marry her,--take her to my people,--have every one say that my
wife had been in jail on suspicion of murder,--that I could not do: no
man would do it who had a reputation to lose. One loves for love's sake,
but one marries for the world's."
He spoke to empty air: there was no one to hear him but the little green
lizards who had slid out of their holes in the stone under the
window-step. Gesualdo had gone across the rough grass of the garden, and
had passed out of sight beyond the tall hedge of rose-laurel.
The young man resumed his writing, but he was restless and uneasy, and
could not continue his calculations of debit and audit of loss and
profit. He took his gun, whistled his dog, and went up towards the
hills, where hares were to be found in the heather and snipes under the
gorse. His temper was ruffled, and his mind in great irritation against
his late companion: he felt angrily that he must have appeared a
poltroon and a poor and unmanly lover in the eyes of the churchman. Yet
he had only spoken, he felt sure, as any other man would have done in
his place.
In the sympathy of their common affliction, his heart had warmed for a
while to Gesualdo, as to the only one who like himself cared for the
fate of Tasso Tassilo's wife; but now that suspicion had entered into
him, there returned with it all his detestation of the Church and all
the secular hatred which the gentle character of the priest of Marca had
for a time lulled in him.
"Of course he is a liar and a hypocrite," he thought savagely. "Perhaps
he is a murderer as well!"
He knew that the idea was a kind of madness. Gesualdo had never been
known to hurt a fly; indeed, his aversion even to see pain inflicted had
made him often the laughing-stock of the children of Marca when he had
rescued birds or locusts or frogs from their tormenting fingers, and
forbidden them to throw stones at the lambs or kids they drove to
pasture. "They are not baptized," the children had often said, with a
grin; and Gesualdo had as often answered, "The good God baptized them
himself."
It was utter madness to suppose that such a man, tender as a woman,
timid as a sheep, gentle as a spaniel, could possibly have stabbed Tasso
Tassilo to the death within a few roods of his own church, almost on
holy ground itself. And yet the idea grew and grew in the mind of
Generosa's lover until it acquired all the force of an actual
conviction. We welcome no supposition so eagerly as one which accords
with and intensifies our own prejudices. He neglected his duties and
occupations to brood over this one suspicion and put together all the
trifles which he could remember in confirmation of it. It haunted him
wherever he was,--at wine-fair, at horse-market, at cattle-sale, in the
corn-field, among the vines, surrounded by his peasantry at noonday, or
alone in the wild deserted garden of the villa by moonlight.
In his pain and fury, it was a solace to him to turn his hatred on to
some living creature. As he sat alone and thought over all which had
passed (as he did think of it night and day always), many a trifle rose
to his mind which seemed to him to confirm his wild and vague suspicions
of the vicar of San Bartolo. Himself a free-thinker, it appeared natural
to suspect any kind of crime in a member of the priesthood. The Italian
sceptic is as narrow and as arrogant in his free-thought as the Italian
believer in his bigotry. Melegari was a good-hearted young man, and kind
and gay and generous by nature; but he had the prejudices of his time
and of his school. These prejudices made him ready to believe that a
priest was always fit food at heart for the galleys or the scaffold,--a
mass of concealed iniquity covered by his cloth.
"I believe you know more of it than any one," he said, roughly, one day
when he passed the priest on a narrow field-path, while his eyes flashed
suspiciously over the downcast face of Gesualdo, who shrank a little, as
if he had received a blow, and was silent. He had spoken on an
unconsidered impulse, and would have been unable to say what his own
meaning really was; but, as he saw the embarrassment and observed the
silence of his companion, what he had uttered at hazard seemed to him
curiously confirmed and strengthened.
"If you know anything which could save her and you do not speak," he
said, passionately, "may all the devils you believe in torture you
through all eternity!"
Gesualdo still kept silent. He made the sign of the cross nervously, and
went on his way.
"Curse all these priests!" said the young man, bitterly, looking after
him. "If one could only deal with them as one does with other men!--but
in their vileness and their feebleness they are covered by their frock
like women."
He was beside himself with rage and misery and the chafing sense of his
own impotence; he was young and strong and ardently enamoured, and yet
he could do no more to save the woman he loved from eternal separation
from him than if he had been an idiot or an infant, than if he had had
no heart in his breast and no blood in his veins.
Whenever he met the vicar afterwards he did not even touch his hat, and
ceased those outward observances of respect to the Church which he had
always given before to please his master, who liked such example to be
set by the steward to the peasantry.
"If Ser Baldo send me away for it, so he must do," he thought. "I will
never set foot in the church again. I should choke that accursed parocco
with his own wafer."
For suspicion is a poisonous weed which, if left to grow unchecked, soon
reaches maturity, and Falko Melegari soon persuaded himself that his own
suspicion was a truth, which only lacked time and testimony to become as
clear to all eyes as it was to his.
CHAPTER IV.
Meantime, Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in him to
persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told under
the seal of confession. He saw the man secretly, and used every argument
with which the doctrines of his Church and his own intense desires could
supply him. But there is no obstinacy so dogged, no egotism so
impenetrable, no shield against persuasion so absolute, as the stolid
ignorance and self-love of a low mind. The Girellone turned a deaf ear
to all censure as to all entreaty: he was stolidly indifferent to all
the woe that he had caused and would cause if he remained silent. What
was all that to him? The thought of the miller's widow shut up in prison
pleased him; he had hated her as he had seen her in what he called her
finery, going by him in the sunshine, with all her bravery of pearl
necklace, of silver hair-pins, of gold watch and chain. Many and many a
time he had thirsted to snatch at them and pull them off her. What right
had she to them, she, a daughter of naked hungry folks, who dug and
carted sea- and river-sand for a living? She was no better than himself!
Now and then, Generosa had called him, in her careless, imperious
fashion, to draw water or carry wood for her, and when she had done so
she never had taken the trouble to bid him good-day or to say a
good-natured word. His pride was hurt, and he had had much ado to
restrain himself from calling her a daughter of beggars, a worm of the
sand. Like her own people, he was pleased that she should now find her
fine clothes and her jewelled trinkets of no avail to her, and that she
should weep the light out of her big eyes, and the rose-bloom off her
peach-like cheeks, in the squalor and nausea of a town prison.
Gesualdo, with all the force which a profound conviction that he speaks
the truth lends to any speaker, wrestled for the soul of this dogged
brute, and warned him of the punishment everlasting which would await
him if he persisted in his refusal to surrender himself to justice. But
he might as well have spoken to the great millstones at rest in the
river-water. Why then had this wretch cast the burden of his vile secret
on innocent shoulders? It was the most poignant anguish to him that he
could awaken no sense of guilt in the conscience of the criminal. The
man had come to him partly from a vague superstitious impulse, remnant
of a credulity instilled into him in childhood, and partly from the want
to _sfogare_ himself, as he called it,--to tell his story to some
one,--which is characteristic of all weak minds in times of trouble and
peril. It had relieved him to drag the priest into sharing his own
guilty consciousness; he was half proud and half afraid of the manner in
which he had slain his master, and bitterly incensed that he had done
the deed for nothing; but beyond this he had no other emotion, except
that he was glad that Generosa should suffer through and for it.
"You will burn forever if you persist in such hideous wickedness," said
Gesualdo again and again to him.
"I will take my chance of that," said the man. "Hell is far off, and the
galleys are near."
"But if you do not believe in my power to absolve you or leave you
accursed, why did you ever confess to me?" cried Gesualdo.
"Because one must clear one's breast to somebody when one has a thing
like that on one's mind," answered the Girellone, "and I know you cannot
tell of it again."
And from that position nothing moved him. No entreaties, threats,
arguments, denunciations, stirred him a hair's-breadth. He had confessed
_per sfogarsi_: that was all.
But one night after Gesualdo had thus spoken to him, vague fears
assailed him,--terrors material, not spiritual: he had parted with his
secret: who could tell that it might not come out like a sleuth-hound
and find him and denounce him? He had told it to be at peace, but he was
not at peace. He feared every instant to have the hand of the law upon
him. Whenever he heard the trot of the carabineers' horses going through
the village, or saw the white belts and cocked hats of gendarmes in the
sunlight of the fields, a cold tremor of terror seized him lest the
priest should, after all, have told. He knew that it was impossible, and
yet he was afraid.
He counted up the money he had saved, a little roll of filthy and
crumpled bank-notes for very small amounts, and wondered if they would
be enough to take him across to America. They were very few, but his
fear compelled him to trust to them. He invented a story of remittances
which he had received from his brother, and told his fellow-laborers and
his employer that he was invited to join that brother; and then he
packed up his few clothes and went. At the mill and in the village they
talked a little of it, saying that the Girellone was in luck, but that
they for their parts would not care to go so far.
Gesualdo heard of his flight in the course of the day.
"My God!--gone away!--out of the country?" he cried, involuntarily, with
white lips.
The people who heard him wondered. "What could it matter to him that a
carter had gone to seek his fortunes over the seas?"
The Girellone had not been either such a good worker or such a good boon
companion that any one at the mill or in the village should greatly
regret him.
"America gets all our rubbish," said the people. "Much good may it do
her!"
Meantime, the man took his way across the country, and, sometimes by
walking, sometimes by lifts in wagons, sometimes by helping
charcoal-burners on the road, made his way, without spending much, to
the sea-coast, and in the port of Leghorn took his passage in an
emigrant-ship then loading there. The green canebrakes and peaceful
millet-fields of Marca saw him no more.
But he had left the burden of his blood-guiltiness behind him, and it
lay on the guiltless soul with the weight of the world.
So long as the man had remained in Marca there had been always a hope
present with Gesualdo that he would persuade him to confess in a court
of justice what he had confessed to the Church, or that some sequence of
accidents would lead up to the discovery of his guilt. But with the
ruffian gone across the seas, lost in that utter darkness which swallows
up the lives of the poor and obscure when once they have left the hamlet
in which their names mean something to their neighbors, this one hope
was quenched; and Gesualdo in agony reproached himself with not having
prevailed in his struggle for the wretch's soul,--with not having been
eloquent enough, or wise enough, or stern enough, to awe him into
declaration of his ghastly secret to the law.
His failure seemed to him a sign of heaven's wrath against himself.
"How dare I," he thought, "how dare I, feeble and timid and useless as I
am, call myself a servant of God, or attempt to minister to other
souls?"
He had thought, like an imbecile, as he told himself, to be able to
awaken the conscience and compel the public confession of this man, and
the possibility of flight had never presented itself to his mind,
natural and simple as had been such a course to a creature without
remorse, continually haunted by personal fears of punishment. He, he
alone on earth, knew the man's guilt; he, he alone, had the power to
save Generosa, and could not use the power because the secrecy of his
holy office was fastened on him like an iron padlock on his lips.
The days passed him like nightmares; he did his duties mechanically,
scarcely consciously; the frightful alternative which was set before him
seemed to parch up the very springs of life itself. He knew that he must
look strange in the eyes of the people; his voice sounded strangely in
his own ears; he began to feel that he was unworthy to administer the
blessed bread to the living, to give the last unction to the dying: he
knew that he was not at fault, and yet he felt that he was accursed.
Choose what he would, he must commit some hateful sin.
The day appointed for the trial came: it was the 10th of May. A hot day,
with the bees booming among the acacia-flowers, and the green tree-frogs
shouting joyously above in the ilex-tops, and the lizards running in and
out of the china-rose hedges on the highways. Many people of Marca were
summoned as witnesses, and these went to the town in mule-carts or crazy
chaises, with the farm-horse put in the shafts, and grumbled because
they would lose their day's labor in their fields, and yet were
pleasurably excited at the idea of seeing Generosa in the prisoner's
dock, and being able themselves to tell all they knew, and a great deal
that they did not know.
Falko Melegari rode over at dawn by himself, and Gesualdo with his
housekeeper and sacristan, who were all summoned to give testimony,
went, as they had no choice but to do, by the diligence, which started
from Sant' Arturo, and rolled through the dusty roads, and over the
bridges, and past the wayside shrines and shops and forges, across the
country to the town.
The vicar never spoke throughout the four weary hours during which the
rickety and crowded vehicle, with its poor, starved, bruised beasts,
rumbled on its road through the lovely shadows and cool sunlight of the
early morning. He held his breviary in his hand for form's sake, and,
seeing him thus absorbed in holy meditation, as they thought, his
garrulous neighbors did not disturb him, but chattered among themselves,
filling the honeysuckle-scented air with the odors of garlic and wine
and coarse tobacco.
Candida glanced at him anxiously from time to time, haunted by she could
not have said what,--a vague presentiment of ill. His face looked very
strange, she thought, and his closely-locked lips were white as the lips
of a corpse. When the diligence was driven over the stones of the town,
all the passengers by it descended at the first wine-house which they
saw on the piazza, to eat and drink; but he, with never a word, motioned
his housekeeper aside when she would have pressed food on him, and went
into the great church of the place to pray alone.
The town was hot and dusty and sparsely peopled. It had brown walls and
large brick palaces untenanted, and ancient towers, also of brick,
pointing high to heaven. It was a place dear to the memory of lovers of
art for the sake of some fine paintings of the Sienese school which hung
in its churches, and was occasionally visited by strangers for sake of
these; but for the most part it was utterly forgotten by the world; and
its bridge of many arches, said to have been built by Augustus, seldom
resounded to any other echoes than those of the heavy wheels of the
hay- or corn-wagons coming in from the pastoral country around.
The court-house, where all great trials took place, stood in one of the
bare, silent, dusty squares of the town. It had once been the ancient
palace of the podesta, and had the machicolated walls, the turreted
towers, and the vast stairways and frescoed chambers of a larger and
statelier time than ours. The hall of justice was a vast chamber
pillared with marble, vaulted and painted, sombre and grand: it was
closely thronged with country-folks; there was a scent of hay, of
garlic, of smoking pipes hastily thrust into trouser-pockets, of
unwashed flesh steaming hotly in the crowd and the close air. The judge
was there with his officers, a Renaissance figure in black square cap
and black gown. The accused was behind the cage assigned to such
prisoners, guarded by carabineers and by the jailers. Gesualdo looked in
once from a distant door-way; then, with a noise in his ears like the
sound of the sea, and a deadly sickness on him, he stayed without in the
audience-chamber, where a breath of air came to him up one of the
staircases, there waiting until his name was called.
The trial began. Everything was the same as it had been in the
preliminary examination which had preceded her committal on the charge
of murder. The same depositions were made now that had then been made.
In the interval, the people of Marca had forgotten a good deal, so added
somewhat of their own invention to make up for the deficiency; but, on
the whole, the testimony was the same, given with that large looseness
of statement and absolute indifference to fact so characteristic of the
Italian mind, the judge, from habit, sifting the chaff from the wheat in
the evidence with unerring skill, and following with admirable patience
the tortuous windings and the hazy imagination of the peasants he
examined.
The examination of Gesualdo did not come on until the third day. These
seventy or eighty hours of suspense were terrible to him. He scarcely
broke his fast, or was conscious of what he did. The whole of the time
was passed by him listening in the court of justice or praying in the
churches. When at last he was summoned, a cold sweat bathed his face and
hair; his hands trembled; he answered the interrogations of the judge
and of the advocates almost at random; his replies seemed scarcely to be
those of a rational being; he passionately affirmed her innocence with
delirious repetition and emphasis, which produced on the minds of the
examiners the contrary effect to that which he endeavored to create.
"This priest knows that she is guilty," thought the president. "He knows
it. Perhaps he knows even more: perhaps he was her accomplice."
His evidence, his aspect, his wild and contradictory words, did as much
harm to her cause as he ignorantly strove to do good. From other
witnesses of Marca the judge had learned that a great friendship had
always been seen to exist between the vicar of San Bartolo and Generosa
Fe, and that on the morning when the murder was discovered the priest
had removed the body of the dead man to the sacristy, forestalling the
officers of justice, and disturbing the scene of the murder. A strong
impression against him was created beforehand in the audience and on the
bench; and his pallid, agitated countenance, his incoherent words, his
wild eyes, which incessantly sought the face of the prisoner, all gave
him the appearance of a man conscious of some guilt himself, and driven
out of his mind by fear. The president cross-examined him without mercy,
censured him, railed at him, and did his uttermost to extract the truth
which he believed that Gesualdo concealed; but to no avail: incoherent
and half insane as he seemed, he said no syllable which could betray
that which he really knew. Only when his eyes rested on Generosa there
was such an agony in them that she herself was startled by it.
"Who would ever have dreamt that he would care so much?" she thought.
"But he was always a tender soul; he always pitied the birds in the
traps, and the oxen that went to the slaughter."
Reproved and censured without stint, for the president knew that to
insult a priest was to merit promotion in high quarters, Gesualdo was at
last permitted to escape from his place of torture. Blind and sick he
got away through the crowd, past the officials, down the stairs, and out
into the hot air. The piazza was thronged with people who could not find
standing-room in the court-house. The murmur of their rapid and loud
voices was like the noise of a sea on his ears; they had all the same
burden. They all repeated like one man the same words, "They will
condemn her," and then wondered what sentence she would
receive,--whether a score of years of seclusion, or a lifetime.
Gesualdo went through the chattering, curious, cruel throng, barbarous
with that barbarity of the populace which in all countries sees with
glee a bull die, a wrestler drop, a malefactor ascend the scaffold, or a
rat scour the streets soaked in petroleum and burning alive. The dead
man had been nothing to them, and his wife had done none of them any
harm, yet there was not a man or a woman, a youth or a girl, in the
crowd, who would not have felt that he or she was defrauded of his
entertainment if she were acquitted by her judges, although yet there
was a general sense among them that she had done no more than had been
natural, and no more than had been her right.
The dark, slender, emaciated figure of the priest glided through their
excited and boisterous groups; the air had the heat of summer, the sky
above was blue and cloudless, the brown brick walls of the church and
palace seemed baking in the light of the sun. In the corner of the
square was a fountain, relic of the old times when the town had been a
place of pageantry and power,--beautiful pale-green water, cold and
fresh, leaping and flowing around marble dolphins. Gesualdo stooped and
drank thirstily, as though he would never cease to drink, then went on
his way and pushed aside the leathern curtain of the church door and
entered into the coolness and solitude of that place of refuge.
There he stretched himself before the cross in prayer, and wept bitter,
burning, unavailing tears for the burden which he bore of another's sin,
and for his own helplessness beneath it, which seemed to him like a
greater crime.
But even at the very altar of his God peace was denied him. Hurried,
loud, impetuous steps from heavy boots fell on the old, worn, marble
floor of the church, and Falko Melegari strode up behind him and laid a
heavy hand upon his shoulders. The young man's face was deeply flushed,
his eyes were savage, his breath was quick and uneven: he had no heed
for the sanctity of the place or of his companion.
"Get up and hear me," he said, roughly. "They all say the verdict will
be against her: you heard them."
Gesualdo made a gesture of assent.
"Very well, then," said the steward, through his clinched teeth. "If it
be so indeed, I swear, as you and I live, that I will denounce you to
the judges in her stead."
Gesualdo did not speak. He stood in a meditative attitude, with his arms
folded on his chest. He did not express either surprise or indignation.
"I will denounce you," repeated Melegari, made more furious by his
silence. "What did you do at night under the Grand Duke's poplars? Why
did you carry in and screen the corpse? Does not the whole village talk
of your strange ways and your altered habits? There is more than enough
against you to send to the galleys a score of better men than you.
Anyhow, I will denounce you if you do not make a clean breast of all you
know to the president to-morrow. You are either the assasin or the
accomplice, you accursed, black-coated hypocrite!"
A slight flush rose on the waxen pallor of Gesualdo's face, but he still
kept silence.
The young man watching him with eyes of hatred, saw guilt in that
obstinate and mulish dumbness.
"You dare not deny it, trained liar though you be!" he said, with
passionate scorn. "Oh, wretched cur, who venture to call yourself a
servitor of heaven, you would let her drag all her years out in misery
to save your own miserable, puling, sexless, worthless life! Well, hear
me, and understand. No one can say that I do not keep my word, and here,
by the cross which hangs above us, I take my oath that if you do not
tell all you know to-morrow, should she be condemned I will denounce you
to the law, and if the law fail to do justice I will kill you as Tasso
Tassilo was killed. May I die childless, penniless, and accursed if my
hand fail!"
Then, with no other word, he strode from the church, the golden
afternoon sunshine streaming through the stained windows above and
falling on his fair hair, his flushed face, his flaming eyes, till his
common humanity seemed as if transfigured. He looked like the avenging
angel of Tintoretto's Paradise.
Gesualdo stood immovable in the deserted church, his arms crossed on his
breast, his head bent. A great resolve, a mighty inspiration, had
descended on him with the furious words of his foe. Light had come to
him as from heaven itself. He could not give up the secret which had
been confided to him in the confessional, but he could give up himself.
His brain was filled with legends of sacrifice and martyrdom. Why might
he not become one of that holy band of martyrs?
Nay, he was too humble to place himself beside them even in thought. The
utmost he could do, he knew, would be only expiation for what seemed to
him his ineffaceable sin in letting any human affection, however
harmless, unselfish, and distant, stain the singleness and purity of his
devotion to his vows. He had been but a peasant-boy until he had taken
his tender heart and his ignorant mind to the seminary, and he had been
born with the soul of a St. Francis, of a San Rocco, of a St. John, out
of place, out of time, in the world he lived in, and in which the
passions of faith and of sacrifice were as strong as are the passions of
lust and of selfishness in other natures. The spiritual world was to him
a reality, and the earth, with its merciless and greedy peoples, its
plague of lusts, its suffering hearts, its endless injustice, an unreal
and hideous dream.
To his temper, the sacrifice which suddenly rose before him as his duty
appeared one which would reconcile him at once to the Deity he had
offended and the humanity he was tempted to betray. To his mind,
enfeebled and exhausted by long fasting of the body and denial of every
natural indulgence, such sacrifice of self seemed an imperious command
from heaven. He would drag out his own life in misery and obloquy,
indeed; but what of that? Had not the great martyrs and founders of his
Church endured as much or more? Was it not by such torture voluntarily
accepted and endured on earth that the grace of God was won?
He would tell a lie, indeed; he would draw down ignominy on the name of
the Church; he would make men believe that an anointed priest was a
common murderer, swayed by low and jealous hatreds; but of this he did
not think. In the tension and perplexity of his tortured soul, the
vision of a sacrifice in which he would be the only sufferer, in which
the woman would be saved and the secret told to him be preserved,
appeared as a heaven-sent solution of the doubts and difficulties in his
path. Stretched in agonized prayer before one of the side altars of the
church, he imagined the afternoon sunbeams streaming through the high
window on his face to be the light of a celestial world, and in the hush
and heat of the incense-scented air he believed that he heard a voice
which cried to him, "By suffering all things are made pure."
He was not a wise, or strong, or educated man. He had the heart of a
poet and the mind of a child. There was a courage in him to which
sacrifice was welcome, and there was a credulity in him which made all
exaggeration of simple faith possible. He was young and ignorant and
weak; yet at the core of his heart there was a dim heroism: he could
suffer and be mute: and in the depths of his heart he loved this woman
better than himself,--with a love which in his belief made him accursed
for all time.
When he at last arose and went out of the church doors his mind was made
up to the course that he would take: an immense calm had descended upon
the unrest of his soul.
The day was done, the sun had set, the scarlet flame of its after-glow
bathed all the rusty walls and dusty ground with colors of glory. The
crowd had dispersed; there was no sound in the deserted square except
the ripple of the water as it fell from the dolphins' mouths into the
marble basin. As he heard that sweet familiar murmur of the falling
stream, the tears rose in his eyes and blotted out the flame-like pomp
and beauty of the skies. Never again would he hear the water of the
Marca river rushing in cool autumn days past the poplar-stems and the
primrose-roots upon its mossy banks; never again would he hear in the
place of his birth the gray-green waves of Arno sweeping through the
canebrakes to the sea.
At three of the clock on the following day the judgment was given in the
court.
Generosa Fe was decreed guilty of the murder of her husband, and
sentenced to twenty years of solitary confinement. She dropped like a
stone when she heard the sentence, and was carried out from the court
insensible. Her lover, when he heard it, gave a roar of anguish like
that of some great beast in torment and dashed his head against the
wall, and struggled like a mad bull in the hands of the men who tried to
hold him. Gesualdo, waiting without on the head of the great staircase,
did not even change countenance: to him this bitterness, as of the
bitterness of death, had been long past; he had been long certain what
the verdict would be; and he had many hours before resolved on his own
part.
A great calm had come upon his soul, and his face had that tranquillity
which comes alone from a soul which is at peace within itself.
The sultry afternoon shed its yellow light on the brown and gray and
dusty town; the crowd poured out of the court-house, excited, contrite,
voluble, pushing and bawling at one another, ready to take the side of
the condemned creature now that she was the victim of the law. The
priest alone of them all did not move: he remained sitting on the
upright chair under a sculptured allegory of Justice and Equity which
was on the arch above his head, and with the golden light of sunset
falling down on him through the high casement above. He paid no heed to
the hurrying of the crowd, to the tramp of guards, to the haste of
clerks and officials eager to finish their day's work and get away to
their wine and dominoes at the taverns. His hands mechanically held his
breviary; his lips mechanically repeated a Latin formula of prayer. When
all the people were gone, one of the custodians of the place touched his
arm, telling him that they were about to close the doors. He raised his
eyes like one who is wakened from a trance, and to the man said,
quietly,--
"I would see the president of the court for a moment quite alone. Is it
possible?"
After many demurs and much delay, they brought him into the presence of
the judge in a small chamber of the great palace.
"What do you want with me?" asked the judge, looking nervously at the
white face and the wild eyes of his unbidden visitant.
Gesualdo answered, "I am come to tell you that you have condemned an
innocent woman."
The judge looked at him with sardonic derision and contempt.
"What more?" he asked. "If she be innocent, will you tell me who is
guilty?"
"I am," replied the priest.
* * * * *
At his trial he never spoke.
With his head bowed and his hands clasped, he stood in the cage where
she had stood, and never replied by any single word to the repeated
interrogations of his judges. Many witnesses were called, and all they
said testified to the apparent truth of his self-accusation. Those who
had always vaguely suspected him, all those who had seen him close the
door of the sacristy on the crowd when he had borne the murdered man
within, the mule-drivers who had seen him digging at night under the
great poplars, the sacristan who had been awakened by him that same
night so early, even his old housekeeper, though she swore that he was a
lamb, a saint, an angel, a creature too good for earth, a holy man whose
mind was distraught by fasting, by visions,--these all, either wilfully
or ignorantly, bore witness which confirmed his own confession. The men
of law had the mould and grass dug up under the Grand Duke's poplar, and
when the blood-stained knife was found therein, the very earth, it
seemed, yielded up testimony against him.
In the end, after many weeks of investigation, Generosa was released,
and he was sentenced in her place.
Her lover married her, and they went to live in his own country in the
Lombard plains, and were happy and prosperous, and the village of Marca
and the waters of its cane-shadowed stream knew them no more.
Sometimes she would say to her husband, "I cannot think that he was
guilty: there was some mystery in it." And her husband always laughed,
and said in answer, "He was guilty, be sure: it was I that frightened
him into confession. Those black rats of the Church have livers as white
as their coats are black."
Generosa did not wholly believe, but she thrust the grain of doubt away
from her and played with her handsome children. And, after all, she
mused, what doubt could there be? Did not Don Gesualdo himself reveal
his guilt? and had he not always cared for her? and was not the whole
population of Marca willing to bear witness that they had always
suspected him and had only held their peace out of respect for the
Church?
He himself lived two long years among the galley-slaves of the western
coast: all that time he never spoke; and he was considered by the
authorities to be insane. Then, in the damp and cold of the third
winter, his lungs decayed, his frail strength gave way; he died of what
they called consumption in the spring of the year. In his last moments
there was seen a light of unspeakable ecstasy upon his face, a smile of
unspeakable rapture on his mouth.
"Laus Deus libera me!" he murmured, as he died.
A bird came and sang at the narrow casement of his prison-cell as his
spirit passed away. It was a nightingale,--perchance one of those who
had once sung to him in the summer nights from the wild-rose hedge at
Marca.
A RAINY JUNE.
_From the Prince di San Zenone, Claridge's, London, to the Duchessa
dell'Aquila Fulva, Monterone, near Milano, Italy._
_Carissima Teresa_,--
I received your letter, which is delightful to me because it is yours,
and terrible to me because it scolds me, abuses me, flies at me, makes
me feel like a schoolboy who has had a _saponata_. Yes, it is quite
true. I cannot help it She has bewitched me. She is a lily made into a
woman. I feared you would be angry, especially angry because she is a
foreigner; but the hour of fate has struck. You will not wonder when you
see her. She is as blonde as the dawn and as pure as a pearl. It seems
to me that I have never loved any woman at all in my life before. To
love her is like plunging one's hand in cool spring-water on a midsummer
noon. She is such repose; such innocence; such holiness! In the midst of
this crowded, over-colored, vulgar London life--for it is very vulgar at
its highest--she seems like some angel of purity. I saw her first
standing with a knot of roses in her hand under a cedar-tree, at one of
their afternoon clubs on the river. She was drinking a cup of tea: they
are always drinking tea. And she is so white. I never saw anything so
white except the snow on the Leonessa. She is not in the least like the
fast young ladies of England of whom one sees so much in the winter at
Rome. I do not like their fast young women. If you want a woman who is
fast, a Parisienne is best, or even an American. Englishwomen overdo it.
She is just like a primrose; like a piece of porcelain; like a soft,
pale star shining in the morning. I write all kinds of poetry when I
think of her. And then there is something _Sainte-Nitouche_ about her
which is delicious because it is so real. The only thing which was
wanting in her was that she ought to have been shut up in a convent, and
I ought to have had to imperil my soul for all eternity by getting her
over a stone wall with a silken ladder. But it is a prosaic age, and
this is a very prosaic country. London amuses me; but it is such a
crowd, and it is frightfully ugly. I cannot think how people who are so
enormously rich as the English can put up with such ugliness. The houses
are all too small, even the big ones. I have not seen a good ball-room.
They say there are good ones in the country houses. The clubs are
admirable; but life in general seems to me hurried, costly, ungraceful,
very noisy, and almost entirely consecrated to eating. It is made up of
a scramble and a mass of food. People engage themselves for dinners a
month in advance. Everybody's engagement-book is so full that it is the
burden of their days. They accept everything, and, at the eleventh hour,
pick out what they prefer, and, to use their own language, "throw over"
the rest. I do not think it is pretty behavior; but nobody seems to
object to it. I wonder that the women do not do so; but they seem to be
afraid of losing their men altogether if they exact good manners from
them. People here are not at all well-mannered, to my taste,--neither
the men nor the women. They are brusque and negligent, and have few
_petite soins_. You should have come over for my marriage to show them
all what an exquisite creature a Venetian patrician beauty can be. Why
_would_ you marry that Piedmontese? Only two things seem to be of any
importance in England: they are eating and politics. They eat all day
long, and are always talking of Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone _m'embete_!
Half of them say he is the destruction of England, the other half say he
is the salvation of England. Myself, I don't care the least which he is;
only I know they cannot keep him out of their conversation, one way or
another, for five minutes, which, to an unprejudiced foreigner, is a
_seccatura_. But to-morrow I go down into the country with my
primrose,--all alone; to-morrow she will be mine altogether and
unalterably, and I shall hear nothing about Mr. Gladstone or anything
that is tiresome. Of course you are wondering that I should marry. I
wonder myself; but, then, if I did not marry I should be compelled to
say an eternal _addio_ to the Lenten Lily. She has such a spiked wall
around her of male relatives and family greatness. It is not the convent
wall; there is no ladder that will go over it; one must enter at the big
front door, or not at all. Felicitate me, and yet compassionate me! I am
going to Paradise, no doubt; but I have the uncomfortable doubt as to
whether it will suit me, which all people who are going to Paradise
always do feel. Why? Because we are mortal or because we are sinners? _A
rivederci, cara mia Teresina!_ Write to me at my future Eden: it is
called Coombe-Bysset, near Luton, Bedfordshire. We are to be there a
month. It is the choice of my primrose.
* * * * *
_From the Lady Mary Bruton, Belgrave Square, London, to Mrs. D'Arcy,
British Embassy, Berlin._
The season has been horribly dull; quantities of marriages. People
always will marry, however dull it is. The one most talked about is that
of the Cowes's second daughter, Lady Gladys, with the Prince of San
Zenone. She is one of the beauties, but a very simple girl, quite
old-fashioned, indeed. She has refused Lord Hampshire, and a good many
other people, and then fallen in love in a week with this Roman, who is
certainly as handsome as a picture. But Cowes didn't like it at all; he
gave in because he couldn't help it; but he was dreadfully vexed that
the Hampshire affair did not come off instead. Hampshire is such a good
creature, and his estates are close to theirs. It is certainly very
provoking for them that this Italian must take it into his head to spend
a season in London, and lead the cotillon so beautifully that all the
young women talked of nothing else but his charms.
* * * * *
_From the Lady Mona St. Clair, Grosvenor Square, London, to Miss Burns,
Schooner-yacht Persephone, off Cherbourg._
The wedding was very pretty yesterday. We had frocks of tussore silk,
with bouquets of orchids and Penelope Boothby caps. She looked very
pretty, but as white as her gown,--such a goose!--it was ivory satin,
with _point de Venise_. He is quite too handsome, and I cannot think
what he could see in her. He gave us each a locket with _her_ portrait
inside. I wished it had been _his_. I dare say Hampshire would have been
better for her, and worn longer, than Romeo. Lord Cowes is furious about
Romeo. He detests the religion and all that, and he could hardly make
himself look pleasant even at church. Of course they were two
ceremonies. The Cardinal had consented at last, though I believe he had
made all kinds of fuss first. Lady Gladys, you know, is very, _very_
High Church, and I suppose that reconciled a little the very
irreconcilable Cardinal. She thinks of nothing but the Church, and her
missions, and her poor people. I am afraid the Roman prince will get
dreadfully bored. And they are going down into Bedfordshire, of all
places, to be shut up for a month! It is very stupid of her, and such a
wet season as it is! They are going to Coombe-Bysset, her aunt Lady
Caroline's place. I fancy Romeo will soon be bored, and I don't think
Coombe-Bysset at all judicious. I would have gone to Homburg, or
Deauville, or Japan.
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire, to
the Countess of Cowes, London._
DEAREST MOTHER,--
I am too, too, too happy. It is no use writing about it. I would if I
could, but I _can't_. He is delighted with Coombe, and says the verdure
is something wonderful. We got here just as the sun was setting. There
were all Aunt Carrie's school-children out to meet us with baskets of
roses. Piero said they looked like bigger roses themselves. He is
enchanted with England. It is very fine to-day, and I do so hope it
won't rain; but the glass is falling. Forgive a hurried word like this.
I am going to take Piero on the lake. I know you haven't liked it, dear;
but, I am sure, when you see how happy I am you will say there was never
any one like him on earth.
* * * * *
_From the Countess of Cowes, Cowes House, London, to the Duchess of
Dunne, Wavernake, Worcestershire._
No, I confess I do not approve of the marriage: it will take her away
from us, and I am afraid she won't be happy. She has always had such
very _exalte_ ideas. She is not in the least the girl of the period. Of
course she was taken by his picturesque face and his admirable manners.
His manners are really wonderful in these days, when our men have none
at all; and he has charmingly caressing and deferential ways, which win
even me. I cannot wonder at her, poor child, but I am afraid: candidly,
I am afraid! He makes all our men look like ploughboys. And it was all
done in such tremendous haste that she had no time to reason or reflect;
and I don't think they have said two serious words to each other. If
only it had been dear, good Hampshire, whom we have known all our lives,
and whose lands march with ours! But that was too good to be, I suppose,
and there was no positive objection we could raise to San Zenone. We
could not refuse his proposals because he is too good-looking, isn't an
Englishman, and has a mother who is reputed _maitresse femme_. Gladys
writes from Coombe as from the seventh heaven. They have been married
three days! But I fear she will have trouble before her. I fear he is
weak and unstable, and will not back her up among his own people when
she goes among them; and though, nowadays, a man and woman, once wedded,
see so little of each other, Gladys is not quite of the time in her
notions. She will take it all very seriously, poor child, and expect the
idyl to be prolonged over the honeymoon. And she is very English in her
tastes, and has been so very little out of England. However, every girl
in London is envying her. It is only her father and I who see these
little black specks on the fruit she has plucked. They are gone to
Coombe by her wish. I think it would have been wiser not to subject an
Italian to such an ordeal as a wet English June in an utterly lonely
country house. You know, even Englishmen, who can always find such
refuge and comfort in prize pigs and straw-yards and unusually big
mangolds, get bored if they are in the country when there is nothing to
shoot; and Englishmen are used to being drenched to the skin every time
they move out. He is not. Lord Cowes says love is like a cotton
frock,--very pretty as long as the sun shines, but it won't stand a
wetting. I wish you had been here: Gladys looked quite lovely. Cardinal
Manning most kindly relented, and the whole thing went off very well. Of
the San Zenone family, there was only present Don Fabrizio, the younger
son, a very good-looking young man. The terrible duchess didn't come, on
account, I think, of her sulks. She hates the marriage on her side as
much as we do on ours, I am sure. Really, one must believe a little bit
in fate. I do think that Gladys would soon have resigned herself to
accepting Hampshire out of sheer fatigue at saying "No;" and, besides,
she knew that we are so fond of him, and to live in the same county was
such an attraction. But this irresistible young Roman must take it into
his head that he wished to see a London season, and when once they had
met (it was one afternoon at Ranelagh) there was no more chance for our
poor, dear, good, stupid neighbor. Well, we must hope for the best!
* * * * *
_From the Prince Piero di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Duchessa
dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Milano._
_Carissima mia_,--
There are quantities of nightingales in little green nests at this
season. I am a nightingale in a green nest. I never saw anything so
green as this Paradise of mine. It is certainly Paradise. If I feel a
little _depayse_ in it, it is only because I have been such a sinner. No
doubt it is only that. Paradise is chilly: this is its only fault. It is
the 6th of June, and we have fires. Fires in the dressing-rooms, fires
in the drawing-rooms, fires at both ends of the library, fires on both
sides of the hall, fires everywhere; and, with all of them, I shiver. I
cannot help shivering, and I feel convinced that, in my rapture, I have
mistaken the month: it must be December. It is all enchantingly pretty
here; the whole place looks in such perfect order that it might have
been taken out of a box last night. I have a little the sensation of
being always at church. That, no doubt, is the effect of the first step
towards virtue that I have ever made. Pray do not think that I am not
perfectly happy. I should be more sensible of my happiness, no doubt, if
I had not quite such a feeling, due to the dampness of the air, of
having been put into an aquarium like a jellyfish. But Gladys is
adorable in every way, and, if she were not quite so easily scared,
would be perfection. It was that little air of hers, like that of some
irresistible Alpine flower, which bewitched me. But when one has got the
Alpine flower, one cannot live forever on it--_ma basta_! I was curious
to know what a Northern woman was like: I know now. She is exquisite,
but a little monotonous and a little prudish. Certainly she will never
compromise me; but then, perhaps, she will never let me compromise
myself, and that will be terrible! I am ungrateful; all men are
ungrateful; but, then, is it not a little the women's fault? They do
keep so very close to one. Now, an angel, you know, becomes tiresome if
one never gets out of the shadow of its wings. Here, at Coombe-Bysset,
the angel fills the horizon.
* * * * *
_From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Milano, to the
Prince Piero di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire,
England._
_Caro mio Pierino_,--
Are you sure you have an angel? People have a trick of always calling
very commonplace women angels. "She is an angel" is a polite way of
saying, "She is a bore." I am not sure, either, that I should care to
live with a veritable angel. One would see too much of the wings, as you
say; and even a guardian angel must be the _terzo incommodo_ sometimes.
Why _would_ you marry an English girl? I dare say she is so
good-tempered that she never contradicts you, and you grow peevish out
of sheer weariness at having everything your own way. If you had married
Nicoletta, as I wanted you to do, she would have flown at you like a
little tigress a dozen times a week, and kept you on the _qui vive_ to
please her. We know what our own men want. I have half a mind to write
to your wife and tell her that no Italian is comfortable unless he has
his ears boxed twice a day. If your wife would be a little disagreeable,
probably you would adore her. But it is a great mistake, _Pierino mio_,
to confuse marriage and love. In reality, they have no more to do with
one another than a horse-chestnut and a chestnut horse--than the
_zuccone_ that means a vegetable and the _zuccone_ that means a
simpleton. I should imagine that your wet English bird's-nest will force
you to realize this truth with lamentable rapidity.
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire, to
Lady Gwendolen Dormer, British Embassy, Vienna._
DEAREST GWEN,--
I did promise, I know, to write to you at once and tell you everything;
and a whole week is gone, and I couldn't do it, I really couldn't; and
even now I don't know where to begin. I suppose I am dreadfully _vieux
jeu_. I suppose you will only laugh at me, and say "spoons." How glad I
am Piero cannot say a word of English, and so I never hear that dreadful
jargon, which I do think so ugly and so vulgar, though you are all so
fond of it. I ought not to have come to Coombe-Bysset: at least, they
all said it was silly. Nessie Fitzgerald was back in London before the
week was out, and doing a play. To be sure, she was married in October,
and she didn't care a bit about him; and I suppose that made all the
difference. To me it seems so much more natural to shut one's self up,
and Piero thought so too; but I am half afraid he finds it a little dull
now. You see, we knew very little of one another. He came for a month of
the London season, and he met me at Ranelagh, and he danced the cotillon
with me at a good many houses, and we cared for one another in a week,
and were married in a month, as you know. Papa hated it because it
wasn't Burlington or Lord Hampshire. But he couldn't really object,
because the San Zenone are such a great Roman family, and all the
world knows them; and they are Spanish dukes as well as Italian
princes. And Piero is such a grand gentleman, and made quite superb
settlements,--much more, papa said, than he could have expected, so poor
as we are. But what I meant was, meeting like that in the rush of the
season, at balls, and dinners, and garden-parties, and luncheons at
Hurlingham, and being married to one another just before Ascot, we
really knew nothing at all of each other's tastes, or habits, or
character. And when, on the first morning at Coombe, we realized that we
were together for life, I think we both felt very odd. We adored one
another, but we didn't know what to talk about; we never had talked to
each other; we never had time. And I am afraid there is something of
this feeling with him. I am afraid he is dreadfully bored, and I told
him so, and he answered, "_Angelina mia_, your admirable countrymen are
not bored in the country because they are always eating. They eat a big
breakfast, they eat a big luncheon, they eat a big dinner, they are
always eating. Myself, I have not that resource. Give me a little coffee
and a little wine, and let me eat only once a day. You never told me I
was expected to absorb food like the crocodiles." What would he say if
he saw a hunting-breakfast in the shires? I suppose life _is_ very
material in England. I think it is why there is so much typhus fever. Do
you know, he wasn't going to dress for dinner because we were alone. As
if that was any reason! I told him it would look so odd to the servants
if he didn't dress, so he has done so since. But he says it is a
_seccatura_ (this means, I believe, a bore), and he told me we English
sacrifice our whole lives to fuss, form, and the outside of things.
There is a good deal of truth in this. What numbers of people one knows
who are ever so poor, and who yet, for the sake of the look of the
thing, get into debt over their ears! And, then, quantities of them go
to church for the form of the thing, when they don't _believe_ one atom;
they will tell you at luncheon that they don't. I fancy Italians are
much more honest than we are in this sort of way. Piero says if they are
poor they don't mind saying so, and if they have no religion they don't
pretend to have any. He declares we English spoil all our lives because
we fancy it is our duty to pretend to be something we are not. Now,
isn't that really very true? I am sure you would delight in all he says.
He is so original, so unconventional. Our people think him ignorant
because he doesn't read and doesn't care a straw about politics. But I
assure you he is as clever as anything can be; and he doesn't get his
ideas out of newspapers, nor repeat like a parrot what his chief of
party tells him. I do wish you could have come over and could have seen
him. It was so unkind of you to be ill just at the very time of my
marriage. You know that it is only to you that I ever say quite what I
feel about things. The girls are too young, and mamma doesn't
understand. She never could see why I would not marry poor Hampshire.
She always said that I should care for him in time. I don't think mamma
can ever have been in love with anybody. I wonder what _she_ married
for: don't you?
* * * * *
_From the Prince Piero di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Count
Zazzari, Italian Legation, London._
_Caro Gigi_,--
Pray send me all the French novels you can find, and a case of Turkish
cigarettes. I am in Paradise, but Paradise is a little dull, and
exceedingly damp, at least in England. Does it always rain in this
country? It has rained here without stopping for seventeen days and a
half. I produce upon myself the impression of being one of those larks
who sit behind wires on a little square of wet grass. I should like to
run up to London. I see you have Jeanne Granier and the others; but I
suppose it would be against all the unwritten canons of a honeymoon.
What a strange institution. A honeymoon! Who first invented it?
* * * * *
_From the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire, to
the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Milano._
_Cara Teresina_,--
I ought to have written to you long since, but you know I am not fond of
writing. I really, also, have nothing to say. Happy the people who have
no history. I am like that people. I was made happy two weeks ago; I
have been happy ever since. It is slightly monotonous. How can you vary
happiness except by quarrelling a little? And then it would not be
happiness any longer. It seems to me that happiness is like an omelet,
best impromptu. Do not think that I am ungrateful, however, either to
fate or to the charming innocent who has become my companion. We have
not two ideas in common. She is lovely to look at, to caress, to adore;
but what to say to her I confess I have no notion. Love ought never have
to find dinner-table conversation. He ought to climb up by a ladder and
get over a balcony, and when his ecstasies are ended, he ought to go the
same way. I fancy she is cleverer than I am; but, as that would be a
discovery fatal to our comfort, I endeavor not to make it. She is
extraordinarily sweet-tempered; indeed, so much so that it makes me
angry; it gives one no excuse for being impatient. She is divine,
exquisite, nymph-like; but, alas, she is a prude! Never was any creature
on earth so exquisitely sensitive, so easily shocked. To live with her
is to walk upon egg-shells. Of course it is very nice in a wife,--very
"proper," as the English say; but it is not amusing. It amused me at
first, but now it seems to me a defect. She has brought me down to this
terribly damp and very green place, where it rains every day and night.
There is a library without novels; there is a cellar without absinthe;
there is a _cuisine_ without tomatoes, or garlic, or any oil at all;
there is an admirably-ordered establishment, so quiet that I fancy I am
in a penitentiary. There are some adorably fine horses, and there are
acres of glass houses used to grow fruits that we throw in Italy to the
pigs. By the way, there are also several of our field-flowers in the
conservatories. We eat pretty nearly all day; there is nothing else to
do. Outside, the scenery is oppressively green, the green of spinach;
there is no variety; there are no ilexes, and there are no olives. I
understand now why the English painters give such staring colors; unless
the colors scream, you don't see them in this aqueous, dim atmosphere.
That is why a benign Providence has made the landscape _aux epinards_. I
think the air here, inside and out, must weigh heavily; it lies on one's
lungs like a sponge. I once went down in a diving-bell when I was a boy;
I have the sensation in this country of being always down in a
diving-bell. The scamp Toniello, whom you may remember as having played
Leporello to my Don Giovanno ever since we were lads, amuses himself
with making love to all the pretty maidens in the village; but, then, I
must not do that--now. They are not very pretty, either. They have very
big teeth, and very long upper lips. Their skins, however, are
admirable. For a horse's skin and a woman's there is no land comparable
to England. It is the country of grooming.
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to Lady Gwendolen
Chichester, British Embassy, St. Petersburg._
He laughed at me because I went to church yesterday, and really I only
went because I thought it _right_. We have been here a fortnight, and I
have never been to church at all till yesterday, and you know how very
serious dear Aunt Carrie is. To-day, as it is the second Sunday I have
been here, I thought I ought to go just once, and I did go; but it was
dreadfully pompous and lonely in the big red pew, and the villagers
stared so, and all the little girls of the village giggled, and looked
at me from under their sun-bonnets. Dear Mr. Coate preached a sermon on
Marriage. It was very kind of him; but oh, how I wished he hadn't! When
I got back, Piero was playing billiards with his servant. I wondered
what Mr. Coate would have thought of him. To be sure, English clergymen
have to get used to fast Sundays now, when the country houses are full.
It is such a dear little yew walk to the church from the house here, not
twenty yards long, and all lined with fuchsia. Do you remember it? Even
Piero admits that it is very pretty, only he says it is a vignette
prettiness,--which, I suppose, is true. "You can see no horizon, only a
green wall," he keeps complaining; and his beautiful, lustrous eyes look
as if they were made to gaze through endless fields of light. When I
asked him yesterday what he really thought of England, what do you
suppose he said? He said, "_Mia cara_, I think it would be a most
delightful country if it had one-fifth of its population, one-half of
its houses, a tithe of its dinners, a quarter of its machinery, none of
its factories, and a wholly different atmosphere!" I suppose this means
that he dislikes it. I think him handsomer than ever. I sent you his
photograph, but that can give you no idea of him. He is like one of his
own marble statues. We came to Coombe-Bysset directly after the
ceremony, and we are here still. I could stay on forever. It is so
lovely in these Bedfordshire woods in mid-June. But I am afraid--just
the very least bit afraid--that Piero may get bored with
me--me--me--nothing but me. He is an angel. We ride in the morning, we
sing and play in the evening. We adore each other all the twenty-four
hours through. I wonder how I could have lived without him. I am longing
to see all he tells me about his great marble palaces, and his immense
dream-like villas, and his gardens with their multitude of statues, and
the wonderful light that is over it all. He protests it is always
twilight with us in England. It seems so absurd, when nowadays everybody
knows everything about everywhere, that I should never have been to
Italy. But we were such country mice down at dear old, dull, green,
muddy Ditchworth. Lanciano, the biggest of all their big places, must be
like a poem. It is a great house, all of different-colored marbles, set
amidst ilex groves on the mountainside, with cascades like Terni, and
gardens that were planned by Giulio Romano, and temples that were there
in the days of Horace. I long to see it all, and yet I hope he will not
want to leave Coombe yet. There is no place like the place where one is
_first_ happy. And, somehow, I fancy I look better in these homely low
rooms of Aunt Carrie's, with their Chippendale furniture and their smell
of dry rose-leaves, than I shall do in those enormous palaces which want
a Semiramis or a Cleopatra. They were kind enough to make a fuss about
me in London, but I never thought much of myself, and I am afraid I must
seem rather dull to Piero, who is so brilliant himself and has all kinds
of talents. You know I never was clever, and really--really--I haven't
an idea what to talk to him about when we don't talk about ourselves.
And then the weather provokes him. We have hardly had one fine day since
we came; and no doubt it seems very gray and chilly to an Italian. "It
cannot be June!" he says, a dozen times a week. And when the whole day
is rainy, as it is very often, for our Junes are such wet ones nowadays,
I can see he gets impatient. He doesn't care for reading; he is fond of
billiards, but I don't play a good enough game to be any amusement to
him. And though he sings divinely, as I told you, he sings as the birds
do,--just when the mood is on him. He does not care about music as a
science in the least. He laughed when I said so. He declared it was no
more a science than love is. Perhaps love ought to be a science too, in
a way, or else it won't last. There has been a scandal in the village,
caused by his servant Toniello. An infuriated father came up to the
house this morning about it. He is named John Best: he has one of Aunt
Carrie's biggest farms. He was in such a dreadful rage, and I had to
talk to him, because, of course, Piero couldn't understand him. Only
when I translated what he said, Piero laughed till he cried, and offered
him a cigarette, and called him "_figlio mio_," which only made Mr. John
Best purple with fury, and he went away in a greater rage than he had
been in when he came, swearing he "would do for the Papist." I have sent
for the steward. I am afraid Aunt Carrie will be terribly annoyed. It
has always been such a model village. Not a public-house near for six
miles, and all the girls such demure, quiet little maidens. The terrible
Roman valet, with his starry eyes and his mandoline, and his audacities,
has been like Mephistopheles in the opera to this secluded and innocent
little hamlet. I beg Piero to send him away; but he looks unutterably
reproachful, and declares he really cannot live without Toniello; and
what can I say?
* * * * *
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di
San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._
You are quite in the wrong, my poor pet. If you were only a little
older, and ever so much wiser, you would have telegraphed to the
libraries yourself for the French books; you would have laughed at them
when he laughed, and, instead of taking Mr. John Best as a tragedy, you
would have made him into a little burlesque, which would have amused
your husband for five minutes as much as Gyp or Jean Richepin. I begin
to think I should have married your Roman prince, and you should have
married my good, dull George, whom a perverse destiny has shoved into
diplomacy. Your Roman scandalizes you, and my George bores me. Such is
marriage, my dear, all the world over. What is the old story? That Jove
broke all the walnuts, and each half is always uselessly seeking its
fellow.
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire, to
the Lady Gwendolin Chichester, British Embassy, St. Petersburg._
But, surely, if he loved me, he would be as perfectly happy with me
alone as I am with him alone. I want no other companion, no other
interest, no other thought.
* * * * *
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, British Embassy, St. Petersburg, to
the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire._
Of course you do not, because you are a woman. San Zenone is your god,
your idol, your ideal, your universe. But _you_ are only one out of the
many women who have pleased him, and attached to the pleasure you afford
him is the very uncomfortable conviction that he will never be able to
get away from you. My dear child, I have no patience with any woman when
she says, "He does not love me." If he does not, it is probably the
woman's fault. Probably she has worried him. Love dies directly it is
worried, quite naturally. Poor Gladys! You were always such a good
child; you were always devoted to your old women, and your queer little
orphans, and your pet cripples, and your East End missions. It certainly
is hard that you should have fallen into the hands of a soulless
Italian, who reads naughty novels all day long and sighs for the
flesh-pots of Egypt! But, my child, in reason's name, what did you
expect? Did you think that all in a moment he would sigh to hear Canon
Farrar or Dean Liddell, take his guitar to a concert in Seven Dials, and
teach Italian to Bethnal Green babies? Be reasonable, and let your poor
caged bird fly out of Coombe-Bysset, which will certainly be your worst
enemy if you shut him up in it much longer.
* * * * *
_From the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Duchessa
dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Milano._
I am still in my box of wet moss. I have been in it two weeks, four
days, and eleven hours, by the calendar and the clocks. I have read all
my novels. I have spelled through my "Figaro," from the title to the
printer's address, every morning. I have smoked twenty cigarettes every
twenty minutes, and I have yawned as many times. This is Paradise, I
know it; I tell myself so; but, still,--I cannot help it,--I yawn. There
is a pale, watery sun, which shines fitfully. There is a quantity of
soaked hay, which they are going to dry by machinery. There is a great
variety of muddy lanes in which to ride. There is a post-office seven
miles off, and a telegraph-station fifteen miles farther off. The
_ensemble_ is not animated. When you go out you see very sleek cattle,
very white sheep, very fat children. You may meet at intervals
laboring-people, very round-shouldered and very sulky. You also meet, if
you are in luck's way, with a traction-engine; and wherever you look you
perceive a church-steeple. It is all very harmless, except the
traction-engine, but it is not animated, or enlivening. You will not
wonder that I soon came to the end of my French novels. The French
novels have enabled me to discover that my angel is very easily ruffled.
In fact, she is that touchy thing, a saint. I had no idea that she was a
saint when I saw her drinking her cup of tea in that garden on the
Thames. True, she had her lovely little serene, holy, _noli-me-tangere_
air; but I thought that would pass. It does not pass. And when I wanted
her to laugh with me at "Autour du Mariage," she blushed up to the eyes,
and was offended. What am I to do? I am no saint. I cannot pretend to be
one. I am not worse than other men, but I like to amuse myself. I cannot
go through life singing a _miserere_. I am afraid we shall quarrel. You
think that very wholesome. But there are quarrels and quarrels. Some
clear the air like thunderstorms. Ours are little irritating
differences, which end in her bursting into tears, and in myself looking
ridiculous and feeling a brute. She has cried quite a number of times in
the last fortnight. I dare say, if she went into a rage, as you justly
say Nicoletta would do, and, you might have added, you have done, it
would rouse me, and I should be ready to strike her, and should end in
covering her with kisses. But she only turns her eyes on me like a dying
fawn, bursts into tears, and goes out of the room. Then she comes in
again--to dinner, perhaps, or to that odd ceremony, five-o'clock
tea--with her little sad, stiff, reproachful air as of a martyr, answers
meekly, and makes me again feel a brute. The English sulk a long time, I
think. We are at daggers drawn one moment, but then we kiss and forget
the next. We are more passionate, but we are more amiable. I want to get
away, to go to Paris, Homburg, Trouville, anywhere, but I dare not
propose it. I only drop adroit hints. If I should die of _ennui_, and be
buried under the wet moss forever, weep for me.
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset,' to Lady Gwendolen
Chichester, St. Petersburg._
Coombe is quite too lovely now. It does rain sometimes, certainly; but
between the showers it is so delicious. I asked Piero to come out and
hear the nightingale,--there really is one in the home wood,--and he
laughed at the idea. He said, "We have hundreds of nightingales shouting
all day and all night at Lanciano. We don't think about them; we eat
them in _pasta_: they are very good." Fancy eating a nightingale! You
might as well eat Romeo and Juliet. Piero has got a number of French
books from London, and he lies about on the couches and reads them. He
wants me to listen to naughty bits of fun out of them; but I will not,
and then he calls me a prude, and gets angry. I don't see why he
shouldn't laugh as much as he likes himself without telling me why he
laughed. I dislike that sort of thing. I am horribly afraid I shall care
for nothing but him all my life; while he--he yawned yesterday. Papa
said to me, before we were married, "My dear little girl, San Zenone
put on such a lot of steam at first, he'll be obliged to ease his pace
after a bit. Don't be vexed if you find the thing cooling!" Now, papa
speaks so oddly; always that sort of floundering, bald metaphor: you
remember it; but I knew what he meant. Nobody could _go on_ being such a
lover as Piero was. Ah, dear, it is in the past already! No, I don't
quite mean that. He is Romeo still very often, and he sings me the
divinest love-songs, lying at my feet on cushions, in the moonlight. But
it is not quite the same thing as it was at first. He found fault with
one of my gowns this morning, and said I was _fagotee_. _Fagotee!_ I am
terribly frightened lest Coombe has bored him too much. I would come
here. I wanted to be utterly out of the world, and so did he; and I'm
sure there isn't a lovers' nest anywhere comparable to Coombe in
midsummer. You remember the rose-garden, and the lime-avenues, and the
chapel ruins by the little lake? When Aunt Carrie offered it to us for
this June I was so delighted; but now I am half afraid the choice of it
was a mistake, and that he does not know what to do with himself. He is
_depayse_. I cried a little yesterday: it was too silly, but I couldn't
help it. He laughed at me, but he got a little angry. "_Enfin que
veux-tu?_" he said, impatiently: "_je suis a toi, bien a toi, beaucoup
trop a toi!_" He seemed to me to regret being mine. I told him so: he
was more angry. It was, I suppose, what you would call a scene. In five
minutes he was penitent, and caressed me as only he can do; and the sun
came out, and we went into the woods and heard the nightingale; but the
remembrance of it alarms me. If he can say as much as this in a month,
what can he say in a year? I do not think I am silly. I had two London
seasons, and all those country houses show one the world. I know people,
when they are married, are always glad to get away from one another;
they are always flirting with other people. But I should be miserable if
I thought it would ever be like that with Piero and me. I worship his
very shadow, and he does--or he did--worship mine. Why should that
change? Why should it not go on forever, as it does in poems? If it
can't, why doesn't one die?
* * * * *
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di
San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._
What a goose you are, you dearest Gladys! You were always like that. To
all you have said I can only reply, "_connu_." When girls are
romantic--and you always were, though it was quite gone out ages before
our time--they always expect husbands to remain lovers. Now, my pet, you
might just as well expect hay to remain grass. Papa was quite right.
When there is such a lot of steam on, it must go off by degrees. I am
afraid, too, you have begun with the passion, and the rapture, and the
mutual adoration, and all the rest of it, which is _quite, quite gone
out_. People don't feel in that sort of way nowadays. Nobody cares much:
a sort of good-humored liking is the utmost one sees. But you were
always such a goose! And now you must marry an Italian, and expect it
all to be balconies, and guitars, and moonlight, for ever and ever. I
think it quite natural he should want to get to Paris. You should never
have taken him to Coombe. I do remember the rose-gardens, and the
lime-avenues, and the ruins; and I remember being sent down there when I
had too strong a flirtation with Philip Rous, who was in F. O. and had
nothing a year. You were a baby then, and I remember that I was bored to
the very brink of suicide: I have detested the smell of a lime-tree ever
since. I can sympathize with the prince if he longs to get away. There
can't be anything for him to do all day long except smoke. The photo of
him is wonderfully handsome; but can you live all your life, my dear, on
a profile?
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen
Chichester, St. Petersburg._
Because almost all Englishmen have snub noses, Englishwomen always think
there is something immoral and delusive about a good profile. At all
events, you will admit that the latter is the more agreeable object of
contemplation. It still rains,--rains dreadfully. The meadows are soaked
and they can't get the hay in, and we can't get out of the house. Piero
does smoke, and he does yawn. He has been looking in the library for a
French novel, but there is nothing except Mrs. Craven's goody-goody
books and a boy's tale by Jules Verne. I am afraid you and mamma are
right. Coombe, in a wet June, is not the place for a Roman who knows his
Paris by heart and doesn't like the country anywhere. We seem to do
nothing but eat. I put on an ulster and high boots, and I don't mind the
rain a bit; but he screams when he sees me in an ulster. "You have no
more figure in that thing than if you were a Bologna sausage," he says
to me; and certainly ulsters are very ugly. But I had a delicious
fortnight with the duchess in a driving-tour in West-meath. We only took
our ulsters with us, and it poured all the time, and we stayed in bed in
the little inns while our things dried, and it was immense fun: the duke
drove us. But Piero would not like that sort of thing. He is like a cat
about rain. He likes to shut the house up early, and have the gas lit,
and forget that it is all slop and mist outside. He declares that we
have made a mistake in the calendar, and that it is November, not June.
I change my gowns three times a day, just as if there were a large
house-party; but I feel I look awfully monotonous to him. I am afraid I
never was amusing. I always envy those women who are all _chic_ and
"go," who can make men laugh so at rubbish. They seem to carry about
with them a sort of exhilarating ether. I don't think they are the best
sort of women; but they do so amuse the men. I would give twenty years
of my life if I could amuse Piero. He adores me; but that is another
thing. That does not prevent him shaking the barometer and yawning. He
seems happiest when he is talking Italian with his servant, Toniello.
Toniello is allowed to play billiards with him sometimes. He is a very
gay, merry, saucy, beautiful-eyed Roman. He has made all the maids in
the house and all the farmers' daughters round Coombe in love with him,
and I told you how he had scandalized one of the best tenants, Mr. John
Best. The Bedford rustics all vow vengeance against him; but he twangs
his mandoline, and sings away at the top of his voice, and doesn't care
a straw that the butler loathes him, the house-steward abhors him, the
grooms would horsewhip him if they dared, and the young farmers audibly
threaten to duck him in the pond. Toniello is very fond of his master,
but he does not extend his allegiance to me. Do you remember Mrs.
Stevens, Aunt Caroline's model housekeeper? You should see her face when
she chances to hear Piero laughing and talking with Toniello. I think
she believes that the end of the world has come. Piero calls Toniello
"_figliolo mio_" and "_caro mio_," just as if they were cousins or
brothers. It appears this is the Italian way. They are very proud in
their own fashion, but it isn't our fashion. However, I am glad the man
is there when I hear the click of the billiard-balls, and the splash of
the rain-drops on the window-panes. We have been here just three weeks.
"_Dio!_ it seems three years," Piero said, when I reminded him of it,
this morning. For me, I don't know whether it is like a single day's
dream or a whole eternity. You know what I mean. But I wish--I wish--it
seemed either the day's dream or the eternity of Paradise to him! I dare
say it is all my fault in coming to these quiet, bay-windowed,
Queen-Anne rooms, and the old-fashioned servants, and the dreary lookout
over the soaking hay-fields. But the sun does come out sometimes, and
then the wet roses smell so sweet, and the wet lime-blossoms glisten in
the light, and the larks sing overhead, and the woods are so green and
so fresh. Still, I don't think he likes it even then: it is all too
moist, too windy, too dim, for him. When I put a rose in his button-hole
this morning, it shook the drops over him, and he said, "_Mais quel
pays!--meme une fleur c'est une douche d'eau froide!_" Last month, if I
had put a dandelion in his coat, he would have sworn it had the odor of
the magnolia and the beauty of the orchid. It is just twenty-two days
ago since we came here, and the first four or five days he never cared
whether it rained or not: he only cared to lie at my feet, really,
literally. We were all in all to each other, just like Cupid and Psyche.
And now--he will play billiards with Toniello to pass the time, and he
is longing for his _petits theatres_. Is it my fault? I torment myself
with a thousand self-accusations. Is it possible I can have been
tiresome, dull, over-exacting? Is it possible he can be disappointed in
me?
* * * * *
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di
San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._
No, it isn't your fault, you dear little donkey: it is only the natural
sequence of things. Men are always like that when the woman loves them:
when she don't, they behave much better. My dear, this is just what is
so annoying about love: the man's is always going slower and slower
towards a dead stop, as the woman's is "coaling" and getting steam up. I
borrow papa's admirably accurate metaphor: nothing can be truer. It is a
great pity, but I suppose the fault is Nature's. _Entre nous_, I don't
think Nature ever contemplated marriage, any more than she did
crinolettes, pearl powder, or the electric light. There is no doubt that
Nature intended to adjust the thing on the butterfly and buttercup
system,--on the _je reste, tu t'en vas_ principle. And nothing would be
easier or nicer, only there are children and property. So the butterfly
has to be pinned down by the buttercup. That is why the Communists and
Anarchists always abolish Property and Marriage together. The one is
evolved out of the other, just as the dear scientists say the horse was
evolved out of a bird, which I never can see makes the matter any easier
of comprehension; but, still--what was I saying? Oh, I meant to say
this: you are only lamenting, as a special defalcation and disloyalty in
San Zenone, what is merely his unconscious and involuntary and perfectly
natural alteration from a lover into a husband. The butterfly is
beginning to feel the pin which has been run through him to stick him
down. It is not your fault, my sweet little girl; it is the fault, if at
all, of the world, which has decreed that the butterfly, to flirt
legitimately with the buttercup, must suffer the corking-pin. Now, take
my advice: the pin is in, don't worry if he writhe on it a little bit!
It is only what the beloved scientists again call automatic action. And
do try and beat into your little head the fact that a man may love you
very dearly, and yet yawn a little for the _petits theatres_ in the
silent recesses of his manly breast. Of course I know this sort of rough
awakening from delightful dreams is harder for you than it is for most,
because you began at such tremendous altitudes. You had your Ruy Blas
and Petrarca and the mandoline and the moonlight and the love-philtres
all mixed up in an intoxicating draught. You have naturally a great deal
more disillusion to go through than if you had married a country squire
or a Scotch laird, who would never have suggested any romantic delights.
One cannot go near heaven without coming down with a crash, like the
poor men in the balloons. You have been up in your balloon, and you are
now coming down. Ah, my dear, everything depends on _how_ you come down!
You will think me a monster for saying so, but it will rest so much in
your own hands. You won't believe it, but it will. If you come down with
tact and good humor, it will all be right afterwards; but if you show
temper, as men say of their horses, why, then the balloon will lie
prone, a torn, empty, useless bag, that will never again get off the
ground. To speak plainly, dear, if you will receive with resignation and
sweetness the unpleasant discovery that San Zenone is mortal, you won't
be unhappy, and you will soon get used to it; but if you perpetually
fret about it you won't alter him, and you will both be miserable; or,
if not miserable, you will do something worse; you will each find your
amusement in somebody else. I know you so well, my poor, pretty Gladys;
you want such an immense quantity of sympathy and affection; but you
won't get it, my dear child. I quite understand that the prince looks
like a picture, and he has made life an erotic poem for you for a month,
and the inevitable reaction which follows seems dull as ditch-water, you
would even say as cruel as the grave. But it is _nothing new_. Do try
and get that well in your mind. Try, too, and be as light-hearted as you
can. Men hate an unamusable woman. Make believe to laugh at the _petits
theatres_ if you can't really do it: if you don't, dear, he will go to
somebody else who will. Why do those _demi-monde_ women get such
preference over us? Only because they don't bore their men. A man would
sooner we flung a champagne-glass at his head than cried for five
minutes. We can't fling champagne-glasses: the prejudices of our
education are against it. It is an immense loss to us; we must make up
for it as much as we can by being as agreeable as we know how to be. We
shall always be a dozen lengths behind those others. By the way, you
said in one of your earliest notes that you wondered why our mother ever
married. I am not sufficiently _au courant_ with pre-historic times to
be able to tell you why, but I can see what she has done since she did
marry. She has always effaced herself in the very wisest and most
prudent manner. She has never begrudged papa his Norway fishing or his
August yachting, though she knew he could ill afford them. She has never
bored him _with_ herself, or _about_ us. She has constantly urged him to
go away and enjoy himself, and when he is down with her in the country
she always takes care that all the women he admires and all the men who
best amuse him shall be invited in relays, to prevent his being dull or
feeling teased for a moment. I am quite sure she has never cared the
least about her own wishes, but has only studied his. This is what I
call being a clever woman and a good woman. But I fear such women are as
rare as blue roses. Try and be like her, my dear. She was quite as young
as you are now when she married. But, unfortunately, in truth, you are a
terrible little egotist. You want to shut up this poor young man all
alone with you in a kind of attitude of perpetual adoration--of
yourself. That is what women call affection: you are not alone in your
ideas. Some men submit to this sort of demand, and go about forever held
tight in a leash, like unslipped pointers. The majority--well, the
majority bolt. And I am sure I should if I were one of them. I do not
think you could complain if your beautiful Romeo did. I can see you so
exactly, with your pretty little grave face, and your eyes that have
such a fatal aptitude for tears, and your solemn little views about
matrimony and its responsibilities, making yourself quite odious to this
mirthful Apollo of yours, and innocently believing all the while that
you are pleasing Heaven and saving your own dignity by being so
remarkably unpleasant! Are you _very_ angry with me? I am afraid so.
Myself, I would much sooner have an unfaithful man than a dull one: the
one may be bored _by_ you, but the other bores _you_, which is
immeasurably worse.
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen
Chichester, St. Petersburg._
DEAR GWEN,--
How can you _possibly_ tell what mamma did when she was young? I dare
say she fretted dreadfully. Now, of course, she has got used to
it,--like all other miserable women. If people marry only to long to be
with other people, what is the use of being married at all? I said so to
Piero, and he answered, very insolently, "_Il n'y a point! Si on le
savait._" He sent for some more dreadful French books, Gyp's, and
Richepin's, and Gui de Maupassant's, and he lies about reading them all
day long when he isn't asleep. He is very often asleep in the daytime.
He apologizes when he is found out, but he yawns as he does so. You say
I should amuse him; but I _can't_ amuse him. He doesn't care for any
English news, and he is beginning to get irritable because I cannot talk
to him in Italian, and he declares my French detestable, and there is
always something dreadful happening. There has been such a terrible
scene in the village. Four of the Coombe-Bysset men, two blacksmiths, a
carpenter, and a laborer, have ducked Toniello in the village pond on
account of his attention to their women-kind; and Toniello, when he
staggered out of the weeds and the slime, drew his knife on them and
stabbed two very badly. Of course he has been taken up by the
constables, and the men he hurt moved to the county hospital. The
magistrates are furious and scandalized; and Piero!--Piero has nobody to
play billiards with him. When the magistrates interrogated him about
Toniello, as, of course, they were obliged to do, he got into a dreadful
passion because one of them said that it was just like a cowardly
Italian to carry a knife and make use of it. Piero absolutely _hissed_
at the solemn old gentleman who mumbled this. "And your people," he
cried, "are they so very courageous? Is it better to beat a man into a
jelly, or kick a woman with nailed boots, as your English mob does?
Where is there anything cowardly? He was one against four. In my country
there is not a night that goes without a _rissa_ of that sort; but
nobody takes any notice. The jealous persons are left to fight it out as
best they may. After all, it is the women's fault." And then he said
some things that really I cannot repeat; and it was a mercy that, as he
spoke in the most rapid and furious French, the old gentleman did not, I
think, understand a syllable. But they saw he was in a passion, and that
scandalized them, because, you know, English people always think that
you should keep your bad temper for your own people at home. Meantime,
of course, Toniello is in prison, and I am afraid they won't let us take
him out on bail, because he has hurt one of the blacksmiths dreadfully.
Aunt Carry's solicitors are doing what they can for him, to please me;
but I can see they consider it all _peines perdues_ for a rogue who
ought to be hanged. "And to think," cries Toniello, "that in my own
country I should have all the _populo_ with me! The very carabineers
themselves would have been with me! _Accidente a tutti quei grulli!_"
which means, "May apoplexy seize these fools!" "They were only the
women's husbands," he adds, with scorn: "they are well worth making a
fuss about, certainly!" Then Piero consoles him, and gives him
cigarettes, and is obliged to leave him sobbing and tearing his hair,
and lying face downward on his bed of sacking. I thought Piero would not
leave the poor fellow alone in prison, and so I supposed he would give
up all idea of going from here; and so I began to say to myself, "_A
quelque chose malheur est bon._" But to-day, at luncheon, Piero said,
"_Sai, carina!_ It was bad enough with Toniello, but without him, I tell
you frankly, I cannot stand any more of it. With Toniello, one could
laugh and forget a little. But now--_anima mia_, if you do not wish me
to kill somebody, and be lodged beside Toniello by your worthy
law-givers, you must really let me go to Trouville." "Alone!" I said;
and I believe it is what he did mean, only the horror in my voice
frightened him from confessing it. He sighed and got up. "I suppose I
shall never be alone any more," he said, impatiently. "If only men knew
what they do when they marry, _on ne nous prendrait jamais_. No, no. Of
course I meant that you must consent to come away with me somewhere out
of this intolerable place, which is made up of fog and green leaves. Let
us go to Paris, to begin with: there is not a soul there, and the
theatres are _en relache_; but it is always delightful, and then, in a
week or so, we will go down to Trouville: all the world is there." I
couldn't answer him for crying. Perhaps that was best, for I am sure I
should have said something wicked, which might have divided us forever.
And then what would people have thought?
* * * * *
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di
San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._
MY POOR LITTLE DEAR,--
Are you already beginning to be miserable about what people will think?
Then, indeed, your days of joy are numbered. If I were to write to you
fifty times, I could only repeat what I have always written. You are not
wise, and you are doing everything you ought not to do. _Of two people
who are married, there is always one who has the delusion that he or she
is necessary and delightful to the life of the other. The other
generally thinks just the contrary._ The result is not peace. This gay,
charming, handsome son of Rome has become your entire world; but don't
suppose for a moment, my child, that you will ever be his. It is not in
reason, not in nature, that you should be. _If_ you have the
intelligence, the tact, and the forbearance required, you _may_ become
his friend and counsellor; but I fear you never will have these. You
fret, you weep, and you understand nothing of the masculine temperament.
"I see snakes," as the Americans observe; and you will not have either
the coolness or the wisdom required to scotch a snake, much less to kill
it. Once for all, my poor pet, go cheerfully to Paris, Trouville, and
all the pleasure-places in the world. Affect enjoyment if you feel it
not, and try to remember, beyond everything, that affection is not to be
retained or revived by either coercion or lamentation. Once dead, it is
not to be awakened by all the "crooning" of its mourner. It is a corpse
for ever and aye. Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young
Italian, who has all the habits of the great world and the memories of
his _vie de garcon_, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an
isolated English country house, with nobody to look at but yourself.
Believe me, my dear child, it is the inordinate vanity of a woman which
makes her imagine that she can be sufficient for her husband. Nothing
but vanity. The cleverer a woman is, the more fully she recognizes her
own insufficiency for the amusement of a man, and the more carefully (if
she be wise) does she take care that this deficiency in her shall never
be forced upon his observation. Now, if you shut a man up with you in a
country house, with the rain raining every day, as in Longfellow's poem,
you do force it upon him most conspicuously. If you were not his wife, I
dare say he would not tire of you, and he might even prefer a gray sky
to a blue one. But as his wife!--oh, my dear, why, why don't you try and
understand what a terrible penalty-weight you carry in the race? Write
and tell me all about it. I shall be anxious. I am so afraid, my sweet
little sister, that you think love is all moonlight and kisses, and
forget that there are clouds in the sky and quarrels on earth. May
heaven save you from both! P.S.--Do remember that this same love
requires just as delicate handling as a cobweb does: if a rough touch
break the cobweb, all the artists in the world can't mend it. There is a
truth for you. If you prevent his going to Paris now, he will go in six
months' time, and perhaps he will go without you. Perhaps he would be
happier at Lanciano than at Coombe, and he would have all his own
people; but he would want the _petits theatres_ all the same. You are
not wise, my poor pet; you should make him feel that you are one with
his pleasures, not, that you and his pleasures are enemies. But it is no
use to instil wisdom into you: you are very young, and very much in
love. You look on all the natural distractions which he inclines to as
so many rivals. So they may be; but _we don't beat our rivals by abusing
them_. The really wise way is to tacitly show that we can be more
attractive than they: if we cannot be so, we may sulk or sigh as we
will, we shall be vanquished by them. You will think me very
preachy-preachy, and perhaps you will throw me in the fire unread; but I
must say just this much more. Dear, you are in love with Love, but
underneath Love there is a real man, and real men are far from ideal
creatures. Now, it is the real man that you want to consider, to humor,
to study. If the real man be pleased, Love will take care of himself;
whereas, if you bore the real man, Love will fly away. If you had been
wise, my poor pet, I repeat, you would have found nothing so delightful
as Judic and Chaumont, and you would have declared that the asphalt
excelled all the Alps in the world. He does not love you the less
because he wants to be _dans le mouvement_, to hear what other men are
saying, and to smoke his cigar among his fellow-creatures.
* * * * *
_From, the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Hotel des Roches Noires,
Trouville, France, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton,
Bedfordshire, England._
Poor flower, in your box of wet moss, what has become of you? Are you
dead, and dried in your wife's _hortus siccus_? She would be quite sure
of you _then_, and I dare say much happier than if you were set forth in
anybody else's bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that "perfectly
proper" _milieu_ (is not that correct English, "perfectly proper"?).
Will you be dreadfully changed when one sees you again? There is a
French proverb which says that "the years of joy count double." The days
of _ennui_ certainly count for years, and give us gray hairs before we
are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You _would_ marry
an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her tea. I told you
beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once shut up in the
country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What people!--to put him
in prison for a little bit of _chiasso_ like that! You should never have
taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that doleful and damp land of
precisians. What will they do with him? And what can you do without him?
The weather here is admirable. There are numbers of people one knows. It
is really very amusing. I go and dance every night, and then we
play,--usually "bac," or roulette. Everybody is very merry. We all talk
often of you, and say the _De Profundis_ over you, my poor Piero. Why
did your cruel destiny make you see a _Sainte-Nitouche_ drinking tea
under a lime-tree? I suppose _Sainte-Nitouche_ would not permit it, else
why not exchange the humid greenness of your matrimonial prison for the
Rue des Planches and the Casino?
* * * * *
_From the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Duchessa
dell'Aquila Fulva, Trouville._
_Carissima mia_,--
I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared that if I do not
go out of this watery atmosphere and verdant Bastile I shall perish of
sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration was for
the moment such that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was going to get
into a passion. It would have been so refreshing! After twenty-six days
of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have been positively
delightful to have had a storm. But no! For an instant she looked at me
with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove's eyes filled, she sighed,
she left the room! Do they not say that feather beds offer an admirable
defence against bullets? I feel like the bullet which has been fired
into the feather bed. The feather bed is victorious. I see the Rue des
Planches through the perspective of the watery atmosphere; the Casino
seems to smile at me from the end of the interminable lime-tree avenue,
which is one of the chief beauties of this house; but, alas! they are
both as far off as if Trouville were in the moon. What could they do to
me if I came alone? Do you know what they could do? I have not the
remotest idea, but I imagine something frightful. They shut up their
public-houses by force, and their dancing-places. Perhaps they would
shut up me. In England they have a great belief in creating virtue by
Act of Parliament. In myself this enforced virtue creates such a revolt
that I shall _tirer sur le mors_, and fly before very long. The admired
excellence of this beautiful estate is that it lies in a ring-fence. I
feel that I shall take a leap over that ring-fence. Do not mistake me,
_cara mia Teresina_, I am exceedingly fond of my wife. I think her quite
lovely, simple, saintly, and truly woman-like. She is exquisitely
pretty, and entirely without vanity, and I am certain she is
immeasurably my superior morally, and possibly mentally too. But--there
is always such a long and melancholy "but" attached to marriage--she
does not amuse me in the least. She is always the same. She is shocked
at nearly everything that is natural or diverting. She thinks me unmanly
because I dislike rain. She buttons about her a hideous, straight,
water-proof garment, and walks out in a deluge. She blushes if I try to
make her laugh at "Figaro," and she goes out of the room when I mention
Trouville. What am I to do with a woman like this? It is an admirable
type, no doubt. Possibly, if she had not shut me up in a country house
in a wet June, with the thermometer at 10 deg. R., and the barometer fixedly
at the word _Rainy_, I might have been always charmed with this St.
Dorothea-like attitude and never have found out the monotony of it. But,
as it is, I yawn till I dislocate my neck. She thinks me a heathen
already. I am convinced that very soon she will think me a brute. And I
am neither. I only want to get out, like the bird in the cage. It is a
worn simile, but it is such a true one.
* * * * *
_From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Roches Noires, Trouville, to the
Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._
_Piero mio_,--
In marriage, the male bird is always wanting to get out when the female
bird does not want him to get out; also, she is forever tightening the
wires over his head, and declaring that nothing can be more delightful
than the perch which she sits on herself. Come to us here. There are any
quantities of birds here who ought to be in their cages, but are not,
and manage to enjoy themselves _quand meme_. If only you had married
Nicoletta! She might have torn your hair occasionally, but she would
never have bored you. There is only one supreme art necessary for a
woman: it is to thoroughly understand that she must never be a
_seccatura_. A woman may be beautiful, admirable, a paragon of virtue, a
marvel of intellect; but if she be a _seccatura--addio_! Whereas, she
may be plain, small, nothing to look at in any way, and a very monster
of sins, big and little; but if she know how to amuse your dull sex, she
is mistress of you all. It is evident that this great art is not studied
at Coombe-Bysset.
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen
Chichester, St. Petersburg._
OH, MY DEAR GWEN,--
It is too dreadful, and I am so utterly wretched! I cannot tell you what
I feel. He is quite determined to go to Trouville by Paris at once, and
just now it is such exquisite weather. It has only rained three times
this week, and the whole place is literally a bower of roses of every
kind. He has been very restless the last few days, and at last,
yesterday, after dinner, he said straight out that he had had enough of
Coombe, and he thought we might be seen at Homburg or Trouville next
week. And he pretended to want every kind of thing that is to be bought
at Paris and nowhere else. Paris!--when we have been together just
twenty-nine days to-day! Paris!--I don't know why, but I feel as if it
would be the end of everything. Paris!--we shall dine at restaurants; we
shall stay at the Windsor; we shall go to theatres; he will be at his
club, he belongs to the Petit Cercle and the Mirliton; we shall be just
like anybody else,--just like all the million-and-one married people who
are always in a crowd. To take one's new-born happiness to an hotel! It
is as profane as it would be to say your prayers on the top of a drag.
To me, it is quite horrible. And it will be put in "Galignani" directly,
of course, that the "Prince and Princess San Zenone have arrived at the
Hotel Bristol." And then all the pretty women who tried to flirt with
him before will laugh and say, "There, you see, she has bored him
already!" Everybody will say so, for they all know I wished to spend the
whole summer at Coombe. If he would only go to his own country, I would
not say a word. I am really longing to see his people, and his palaces,
and the wonderful gardens, with their statues and their ilex woods, and
the temples that are as old as the days of Augustus, and the fire-flies,
and the magnolia-groves, and the peasants who are always singing; but he
won't go there. He says it is a _seccatura_. Everything is a
_seccatura_. He only likes places where he can meet all the world.
"Paris will be a solitude too, never fear," he said, very petulantly;
"for there will be all the _petits theatres_, and the open-air concerts,
and we can dine in the Bois and down the river, and we can run to
Trouville. It will be better than rain, rain, rain, and nothing to look
at except your amiable aunt's big horses and big trees. I adore horses,
and trees are not bad if they are planted away from the house, but,
viewed as eternal companions, one may have too much of them." And I am
his eternal companion; but it seems already I don't count! I have not
said anything. I know one oughtn't. But Piero saw how it vexed me, and
it made him cross. "_Cara mia_," he said, "why did you not tell me
before we married that you intended me to be buried forever in a box
under wet leaves, like a rose that is being sent to the market? I should
have known what to expect; and I do not like wet leaves." I could not
help reminding him that he had been ever, ever so anxious to come to
Coombe. Then he laughed; but he was very cross, too. "Could I tell,
_anima mia_," he cried, "that Coombe was situated in a succession of
lagoons, contains not one single French novel, is fifteen miles asunder
from its own railway-station, and is blessed with a population of
day-laborers? What man have I seen since I have been here, except your
parish priest, who mumbles, wears spectacles, and tries to give me a
tract against the Holy Father? In this country you do not know what it
is to be warm. You do not know what sunshine is like. You take an
umbrella when you go in the garden. You put on a water-proof to go and
hear one little, shivering nightingale sing in a wet elder-bush. I tell
you I am tired of your country, absolutely tired. You are an angel; no
doubt you are an angel; but you cannot console me for the intolerable
emptiness of this intolerable life, where there is nothing on earth to
do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and drive in a dog-cart." All this he
said in one breath, in a flash of forked lightning, as it were. Now that
I write it down, it does not seem so very dreadful; but as he, with the
most fiery scorn, the most contemptuous passion, said it, I assure you
it was terrible. It revealed, just as the flash of lightning would show
a gravel-pit, how fearfully bored he has been all the time I thought he
was happy.
* * * * *
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di
San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset._
Men are very easily bored, my dear, if they have any brains. It is only
the dull ones who are not.
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester._
If I believed what your cynical letter says, I should leave him
to-morrow. I would never live through a succession of disillusions and
of insults.
* * * * *
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester to the Princess di San Zenone._
Where are your principles? Where are your duties? My dear little girl,
you have married him; you must submit to him as he is. Marriages
wouldn't last two days if just because the man yawned the woman ran
away. Men always yawn. Hitherto, all San Zenone's faults appear to
consist in the very pardonable fact that, being an Italian, he is not
alive to the charms of bucolic England in rainy weather, and that, being
a young man, he wants to see his Paris again. Neither of these seem to
me irreparable crimes. Go to Paris and try to enjoy yourself. After all,
if his profile be so beautiful, you ought to be sufficiently happy in
gazing at it from the back of a _baignoir_. I grant that it is not the
highest amatory ideal,--to rush about the boulevards in a daument, and
eat delicious little dinners in the cafes, and laugh at Judic or
Chaumont afterwards; but _l'amour peut se nicher_ anywhere. And Love
won't be any the worse for having his digestion studied by good cooks,
and his possible _ennui_ exorcised by good players. You see for yourself
that the great passion yawns after a time. Turn back to what you call my
cynical letter, and re-read my remarks upon Nature. By the way, I
entirely deny that they are cynical. On the contrary, I inculcate on you
patience, sweetness of temper, and adaptability to circumstances,--three
most amiable qualities. If I were a cynic, I should say to you that
Marriage is a Mistake, and two capital letters could hardly emphasize
this melancholy truth sufficiently. But, as there are men and women,
and, as I before observed, property, in the world, nothing better for
the consolidation of rents and freeholds has, as yet, been discovered. I
dare say Krapotkine in his prison could devise something better; but
they are afraid of him. So we all jog on in the old routine, vaguely
conscious that we are all blunderers, but indisposed for such a drastic
remedy as would alone cure us. Just you remark to any lawyer that
marriage is a mistake, as I have said before, and see what answer you
will get. He will certainly reply to you that there is no other way of
securing the transmission of property safely. I confess that this view
of wealth makes me, for one, a most desperate Radical. Only think, if
there were no property, we should all be frisking about in our happy
valleys as free and as merry as little kids. I shouldn't now be obliged
to put on all my war-paint and beads, like a savage, and go out to a
dreadful court dinner, four hours long, because George has a "career"
and thinks my suffering advances it. Oh, you happy child, to have
nothing worse to do than to rattle down the Bois in a _milord_, and sup
off a _matelote_ by the lake with your Romeo!
* * * * *
_From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen
Chichester, St. Petersburg._
We are to leave for Paris and Trouville to-morrow. I have yielded, as
you and mamma seemed to think it was my _duty_ to do. But my life is
over. I shall say farewell to all happiness when the gates of
Coombe-Bysset close upon me. Henceforth we shall be like everybody else.
However, you cannot reproach me any longer with being selfish, nor can
he. There is a great friend of his, the Duchess of Aquila Fulva, at
Trouville. She writes to him very often, I know. He never offers to show
me her letters. _I believe the choice of Trouville is her doing._ Write
to me at Paris, at The Windsor.
* * * * *
_From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di
San Zenone, Hotel Windsor, Paris._
MY POOR CHILD!--
Has the green-eyed monster already invaded your gentle soul because he
doesn't show you his own letters? My dear, no man who was not born a
_our_ would show a woman's letters to his wife. Surely you wish your
hero to know the A, B, C of gentle manners! I am delighted you are going
into the world; but if you only go as "a duty" I am afraid the results
won't be sunshiny. "Duty" is such a _very_ disagreeable thing. It always
rolls itself up like a hedgehog, with all its prickles out, turning
forever round and round on the axle of its own self-admiration. If you
go to Trouville, and wherever else you do go, _en martyr_, my dear, you
will give the mischievous duchess, if she be mischievous, a terrible
advantage over you at starting. If you mean to be silent, unpleasant,
and enwrapped in a gloomy contemplation of your own merits and wrongs,
don't blame _him_ if he spend his time at the Casino with his friend, or
somebody worse. I am quite sure you _mean_ to be unselfish, and you
fancy you are so, and all the rest of it, quite honestly; but, in real
truth, as I told you before, you are only an egotist. You would rather
keep this unhappy Piero on thorns beside you than see him enjoy himself
with other people. Now, I call that shockingly selfish; and if you go in
that spirit to Trouville he will soon begin to wish, my dear child, that
he had never had a fancy to come over to a London season. I can see you
so exactly! Too dignified to be cross, too offended to be companionable;
silent, reproachful, terrible!
* * * * *
_From the Lady Mary Bruton, Roches Noires, Trouville, to Mrs. D'Arcy,
British Embassy, Berlin._
July 15th.
... Among the new arrivals here are the San Zenone. You remember my
telling you of their marriage some six weeks ago. It was quite _the_
marriage of the season. They really were immensely in love with each
other, but that stupid month down in the country has done its usual
work. In a rainy June, too! Of course any poor Amorina would emerge from
his captivity bedraggled, dripping, and disenchanted. She is really very
pretty,--quite lovely, indeed,--but she looks fretful and dull; her
handsome husband, on the contrary, is as gay as a lark which has found
the door of its cage wide open one morning. There is here a great friend
of his, a Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva. _She_ is very gay too; she is
always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning to night in shrill
Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of all eyes as she goes
to swim in a rose-colored _maillot_, with an orange-and-gold Eastern
burnous flung about her artistically. She has that wonderful Venetian
coloring which can stand a contrast and glow of color which would simply
kill any other woman. She is very tall, and magnificently made, and yet
uncommonly graceful. Last night she was persuaded to dance a
_salterello_ with San Zenone at the Maison Persane, and it was
marvellous. They are both such handsome people, and threw such wonderful
_brio_, as they would call it, into the affair. The poor little, pretty
princess, looking as fair and as dull as a primrose in a shower, sat
looking on dismally. Stupid little thing!--as if _that_ would do her any
good! A few days ago Lord Hampshire arrived off here in his yacht. He
was present at the _salterello_, and as I saw him out in the gardens
afterwards with the neglected one, sitting beside her in the moonlight,
I presume he was offering her sympathy and consolation. He is a heavy
young fellow, but exceedingly good-humored and kind-hearted. _He_ would
have been in heaven in the wet June at Coombe-Bysset; but she refused
him, silly little thing! I am quite angry with her: she has had her own
way, and she won't make the best of that. I met her and her rejected
admirer riding together this morning towards Villerville, while the
beautiful prince was splashing about in the water with his Venetian
friend. I see a great many eventual complications ahead. Well, they will
all be the fault of that Rainy June!