Monna Brigida’s Conversion.
When Romola said that some one else expected her, she meant her cousin
Brigida, but she was far from suspecting how much that good kinswoman
was in need of her. Returning together towards the Piazza, they had
descried the company of youths coming to a stand before Tessa, and when
Romola, having approached near enough to see the simple little
contadina’s distress, said, “Wait for me a moment, cousin,” Monna
Brigida said hastily, “Ah, I will not go on: come for me to Boni’s
shop,—I shall go back there.”
The truth was, Monna Brigida had a consciousness on the one hand of
certain “vanities” carried on her person, and on the other of a growing
alarm lest the Piagnoni should be right in holding that rouge, and
false hair, and pearl embroidery, endamaged the soul. Their serious
view of things filled the air like an odour; nothing seemed to have
exactly the same flavour as it used to have; and there was the dear
child Romola, in her youth and beauty, leading a life that was
uncomfortably suggestive of rigorous demands on woman. A widow at
fifty-five whose satisfaction has been largely drawn from what she
thinks of her own person, and what she believes others think of it,
requires a great fund of imagination to keep her spirits buoyant. And
Monna Brigida had begun to have frequent struggles at her toilet. If
her soul would prosper better without them, was it really worth while
to put on the rouge and the braids? But when she lifted up the
hand-mirror and saw a sallow face with baggy cheeks, and crows’-feet
that were not to be dissimulated by any simpering of the lips—when she
parted her grey hair, and let it lie in simple Piagnone fashion round
her face, her courage failed. Monna Berta would certainly burst out
laughing at her, and call her an old hag, and as Monna Berta was really
only fifty-two, she had a superiority which would make the observation
cutting. Every woman who was not a Piagnone would give a shrug at the
sight of her, and the men would accost her as if she were their
grandmother. Whereas, at fifty-five a woman was not so very old—she
only required making up a little. So the rouge and the braids and the
embroidered berretta went on again, and Monna Brigida was satisfied
with the accustomed effect; as for her neck, if she covered it up,
people might suppose it was too old to show, and, on the contrary, with
the necklaces round it, it looked better than Monna Berta’s. This very
day, when she was preparing for the Piagnone Carnival, such a struggle
had occurred, and the conflicting fears and longings which caused the
struggle, caused her to turn back and seek refuge in the druggist’s
shop rather than encounter the collectors of the Anathema when Romola
was not by her side. But Monna Brigida was not quite rapid enough in
her retreat. She had been descried, even before she turned away, by the
white-robed boys in the rear of those who wheeled round towards Tessa,
and the willingness with which Tessa was given up was, perhaps,
slightly due to the fact that part of the troop had already accosted a
personage carrying more markedly upon her the dangerous weight of the
Anathema. It happened that several of this troop were at the youngest
age taken into peculiar training; and a small fellow of ten, his olive
wreath resting above cherubic cheeks and wide brown eyes, his
imagination really possessed with a hovering awe at existence as
something in which great consequences impended on being good or bad,
his longings nevertheless running in the direction of mastery and
mischief, was the first to reach Monna Brigida and place himself across
her path. She felt angry, and looked for an open door, but there was
not one at hand, and by attempting to escape now, she would only make
things worse. But it was not the cherubic-faced young one who first
addressed her; it was a youth of fifteen, who held one handle of a wide
basket.
“Venerable mother!” he began, “the blessed Jesus commands you to give
up the Anathema which you carry upon you. That cap embroidered with
pearls, those jewels that fasten up your false hair—let them be given
up and sold for the poor; and cast the hair itself away from you, as a
lie that is only fit for burning. Doubtless, too, you have other jewels
under your silk mantle.”
“Yes, lady,” said the youth at the other handle, who had many of Fra
Girolamo’s phrases by heart, “they are too heavy for you: they are
heavier than a millstone, and are weighting you for perdition. Will you
adorn yourself with the hunger of the poor, and be proud to carry God’s
curse upon your head?”
“In truth you are old, buona madre,” said the cherubic boy, in a sweet
soprano. “You look very ugly with the red on your cheeks and that black
glistening hair, and those fine things. It is only Satan who can like
to see you. Your Angel is sorry. He wants you to rub away the red.”
The little fellow snatched a soft silk scarf from the basket, and held
it towards Monna Brigida, that she might use it as her guardian angel
desired. Her anger and mortification were fast giving way to spiritual
alarm. Monna Berta and that cloud of witnesses, highly-dressed society
in general, were not looking at her, and she was surrounded by young
monitors, whose white robes, and wreaths, and red crosses, and dreadful
candour, had something awful in their unusualness. Her Franciscan
confessor, Fra Cristoforo, of Santa Croce, was not at hand to reinforce
her distrust of Dominican teaching, and she was helplessly possessed
and shaken by a vague sense that a supreme warning was come to her.
Unvisited by the least suggestion of any other course that was open to
her, she took the scarf that was held out, and rubbed her cheeks, with
trembling submissiveness.
“It is well, madonna,” said the second youth. “It is a holy beginning.
And when you have taken those vanities from your head, the dew of
heavenly grace will descend on it.” The infusion of mischief was
getting stronger, and putting his hand to one of the jewelled pins that
fastened her braids to the berretta, he drew it out. The heavy black
plait fell down over Monna Brigida’s face, and dragged the rest of the
head-gear forward. It was a new reason for not hesitating: she put up
her hands hastily, undid the other fastenings, and flung down into the
basket of doom her beloved crimson-velvet berretta, with all its
unsurpassed embroidery of seed-pearls, and stood an unrouged woman,
with grey hair pushed backward from a face where certain deep lines of
age had triumphed over _embonpoint_.
But the berretta was not allowed to lie in the basket. With impish zeal
the youngsters lifted it, and held it up pitilessly, with the false
hair dangling.
“See, venerable mother,” said the taller youth, “what ugly lies you
have delivered yourself from! And now you look like the blessed Saint
Anna, the mother of the Holy Virgin.”
Thoughts of going into a convent forthwith, and never showing herself
in the world again, were rushing through Monna Brigida’s mind. There
was nothing possible for her but to take care of her soul.
Of course, there were spectators laughing: she had no need to look
round to assure herself of that. Well! it would, perhaps, be better to
be forced to think more of Paradise. But at the thought that the dear
accustomed world was no longer in her choice, there gathered some of
those hard tears which just moisten elderly eyes, and she could see but
dimly a large rough hand holding a red cross, which was suddenly thrust
before her over the shoulders of the boys, while a strong guttural
voice said—
“Only four quattrini, madonna, blessing and all! Buy it. You’ll find a
comfort in it now your wig’s gone. Deh! what are we sinners doing all
our lives? Making soup in a basket, and getting nothing but the scum
for our stomachs. Better buy a blessing, madonna! Only four quattrini;
the profit is not so much as the smell of a danaro, and it goes to the
poor.”
Monna Brigida, in dim-eyed confusion, was proceeding to the further
submission of reaching money from her embroidered scarsella, at present
hidden by her silk mantle, when the group round her, which she had not
yet entertained the idea of escaping, opened before a figure as welcome
as an angel loosing prison-bolts.
“Romola, look at me!” said Monna Brigida, in a piteous tone, putting
out both her hands.
The white troop was already moving away, with a slight consciousness
that its zeal about the head-gear had been superabundant enough to
afford a dispensation from any further demand for penitential
offerings.
“Dear cousin, don’t be distressed,” said Romola, smitten with pity, yet
hardly able to help smiling at the sudden apparition of her kinswoman
in a genuine, natural guise, strangely contrasted with all memories of
her. She took the black drapery from her own head, and threw it over
Monna Brigida’s. “There,” she went on soothingly, “no one will remark
you now. We will turn down the Via del Palagio and go straight to our
house.”
They hastened away, Monna Brigida grasping Romola’s hand tightly, as if
to get a stronger assurance of her being actually there.
“Ah, my Romola, my dear child!” said the short fat woman, hurrying with
frequent steps to keep pace with the majestic young figure beside her;
“what an old scarecrow I am! I must be good—I mean to be good!”
“Yes, yes; buy a cross!” said the guttural voice, while the rough hand
was thrust once more before Monna Brigida: for Bratti was not to be
abashed by Romola’s presence into renouncing a probable customer, and
had quietly followed up their retreat. “Only four quattrini, blessing
and all—and if there was any profit, it would all go to the poor.”
Monna Brigida would have been compelled to pause, even if she had been
in a less submissive mood. She put up one hand deprecatingly to arrest
Romola’s remonstrance, and with the other reached out a grosso, worth
many white quattrini, saying, in an entreating tone—
“Take it, good man, and begone.”
“You’re in the right, madonna,” said Bratti, taking the coin quickly,
and thrusting the cross into her hand; “I’ll not offer you change, for
I might as well rob you of a mass. What! we must all be scorched a
little, but you’ll come off the easier; better fall from the window
than the roof. A good Easter and a good year to you!”
“Well, Romola,” cried Monna Brigida, pathetically, as Bratti left them,
“if I’m to be a Piagnone it’s no matter how I look!”
“Dear cousin,” said Romola, smiling at her affectionately, “you don’t
know how much better you look than you ever did before. I see now how
good-natured your face is, like yourself. That red and finery seemed to
thrust themselves forward and hide expression. Ask our Piero or any
other painter if he would not rather paint your portrait now than
before. I think all lines of the human face have something either
touching or grand, unless they seem to come from low passions. How fine
old men are, like my godfather! Why should not old women look grand and
simple?”
“Yes, when one gets to be sixty, my Romola,” said Brigida, relapsing a
little; “but I’m only fifty-five, and Monna Berta, and everybody—but
it’s no use: I will be good, like you. Your mother, if she’d been
alive, would have been as old as I am; we were cousins together. One
_must_ either die or get old. But it doesn’t matter about being old, if
one’s a Piagnone.”