So long as there was a human eye upon her, Beatrice of Ferrara
governed the mingled and passionate feelings that struggled with each
other in her bosom, and would fain have had the mastery of her also.
After a time, however, when she had preserved her apparent calmness
long enough to deceive completely those around her; when she had
drawn, with a hand full of grace and fancy, the groups of flowers
which were to serve as patterns for her maiden's embroidery--had
struck the chords of her lute with a careless but skilful hand, and
talked for some ten minutes on a butterfly--she desired to be left
alone.
Then however, when, with the door closed and the arras drawn, there
was no eye upon her but that of Heaven, she once more gave way to all
she felt. "Oh, God! Oh, God!" she cried, clasping her small hands, "to
be thus treated by one whom I have so deeply loved--for whom I have
done so much--for whose sake I sacrificed my nights and days,
scattered my fortunes, left my state and station, took on me menial
offices, put my life in peril, and even my good name to risk--and
more, far more, for whom I forgot and pardoned those errors that women
forget least easily, and loved him still, even when he sported with my
love as a thing of nought! Oh, God! oh, God! that he who, if ever man
yet believed the love of woman to be a pure and holy thing, should
have held the feelings of my heart most sacred--that he should dare to
talk to me the words of shame, the vile sophisms of guilt and infamy;
that he should dream that I--I who have stood alone, in the midst of a
depraved court, the wonder and hatred of them all--that I should
become his paramour, his leman, to be held or discarded at his
pleasure--to play him sweet airs upon the lute, and sing to him when
he was in the mood, and be called the Italian mistress of the gay
Count d'Aubin!" and, as she called up all the images of the
degradation he had proposed, she strained her hands upon one another
till the clear blood vanished from beneath the small finger nails; and
she raised her dark eyes to heaven, as if asking, "Is it possible that
God can permit such baseness."
"It is my own fault!" she cried at length; "it is my own fault! I
should have known too well what a vile slave man is--how he licks the
dust beneath our feet, so long as we tread upon his neck, and turns to
smite us as soon as we smile upon him. I should have known it, and
with haughty dignity and distant sternness commanded the love that I
have stooped to win. It is my own fault, weak girl that I am--it is my
own fault! He thought that she who could go masquerading in boy's
attire, and make herself the companion of grooms and horse-boys for
his sake--that she who could dare the perils of the camp in a strange
guise--could come and go, at the risk of question and discovery,
through the gates of a beleaguered city--could bind up his wounds with
her own hands, and watch for fourteen nights by the side of his sick
bed,--would surely refuse him nothing--no, not her honour. Or perhaps
even now, in his profligacy of heart, he scoffs and jeers at the
thought of my fastidiousness; or deems that, by a cunning device and
affectation of virtue, I sought to patch up a ruined reputation by a
marriage with him. He may hold me as some light wanton! Out upon him!
out upon him! Did he but know the heart he tramples on!" and bursting
into tears, she covered her face with her hands, and remained thus for
several minutes in silent bitterness of heart.
The tears again seemed to relieve her; and at length she wiped them
from her eyes, and looked out vacantly upon the gay and sunny
landscape that lay stretched in bright confusion from the height on
which the chateau stood, to some distant hills, that, rising again on
the opposite side of a deep valley, towered up, now covered with green
woods, now massed in the grey distance.
However resolutely the soul may hold itself within the citadel of the
heart besieged by grief, the garrison of that sad fortress will be
affected by the sight of things that pass beyond its limits. Sweet
sounds, though we listen to them not, will tend to soothe; and
pleasant objects, though the eye appears void of all remark, will
tranquillize and calm. There were lovelier scenes to be found on
earth, than that which lay beneath her sight, and Beatrice had seen
many fairer far: but over it the sun, now slanting down towards his
rest, was casting soft broad shadows; and now and then a slow passing
cloud came, like the faint and pleasing shade of melancholy that
sometimes steals upon our happiest moments, and touched the bright
things below with a blue ethereal hue as it flitted on above them.
Nothing was seen to move in the sky or on the earth, but that slow
cloud and its soft shadow; but, on a bough before the window, a
gay-hearted bird carolled volubly to the evening sun, mingling,
however, now and then, with its blither notes, a tone or two in a sad
minor key, which made its song harmonise both with the scene and with
the heart of her who listened. I am wrong; the heart of Beatrice did
not harmonise with it,--her bosom was full of griefs too deep, too
lasting, to assimilate with the glad voice of nature; but still the
melancholy tones so far chastened the cheerful song of the bird, that
she could hear it and not think it harsh, and the shadows of that
cloud were just sufficient to make her feel the brightness not
blighting. She sat and gazed; and though neither her eye nor her ear
marked anything with precision, she fell into a dreamy fit of musing,
and that musing was softer and less bitter than it had been.
True, she thought of the course of her love, and of that love's
blight. She knew that for her joys of life, the dreams, the hopes, the
imaginings--all the green things of a happy heart, in short--were
withered, and blasted, and shrivelled up, like the leaves of a bough
broken off by the lightning. To be calm and passionless, sad and
solitary, were the brightest aspirations which her once ardent bosom
could harbour now; but still to think over such a state, was peace, to
the bitter paroxysm that went before. Did she ever think that hope
might revive in regard to him she had loved? Never! For though her
love was not over--ah, no! and she would have given her fortune and
her life to have blessed him; yet so lost was all her esteem and all
her confidence, that could she have thought her heart would ever
betray her into one weak fancy in regard to him, she would have torn
it out to trample it beneath her feet. She loved him still, she knew,
she felt she loved him; for her heart was as a pile of incense which
that passion had lighted, and the fire could only be extinguished by
the end of her own being; but still the dream, the bright and golden
dream, of happiness was over; and not even love--that ardent and
undying love, which was now an indivisible part of her being and her
soul--could have bribed her, by the brightest promises of hope, to see
that man again, or hear his lips pronounce one other word. No!
bitterly, but fully, was she convinced at last of his unworthiness;
and though she still loved the erring and earthly being whom her own
imagination had purified and adorned, the dream of hope was at an
end--the voice of the syren was mute: and yet a consolation gradually
stole upon her heart, soothed the anguish and disappointment, and did
away the indignation and disdain. On it, too, she framed the scheme of
her future life, as she paused and thought of the coming years. That
consolation was the conviction, the certainty, the indubitable
assurance, that she was beloved; that he who had insulted and injured
her--who had repaid her tenderness with ingratitude, and her
confidence by baseness--still loved her deeply, passionately, and
alone. What then was her resolution? Not to watch him farther, even
through the eyes of others--not to seek for tidings of his actions, or
to dream that he would amend; but on the contrary, to fly him far and
for ever; to shut her ears against every rumour from the land in which
he lived, and dead as he was to her, to consider him no more amongst
the living; but still, as the balm and the comfort of the long
after-years, to remember that she had been beloved--that, impure and
dark as was the flame that had been lighted upon the altar of his
heart, still it had been kindled, and had burned for her. This was to
be the theme of memory--the occupation of her long, lonely hours--the
matter for the immortal working of thought--the balsam for her wounded
heart--the light of her long night of maiden widowhood,--that she had
been loved by him she loved!
As she thus thought, and as she thus determined, the bitterness of her
grief diminished. Dark and melancholy, indeed, was the fate that she
pictured for herself, but yet it was relief, for it offered her
tranquillity at least; and she had learned, amidst the strife of hope,
and fear, and passion, to value God's best blessing--peace. Her
meditations had been long, and had not exactly followed the even
course in which they have been here detailed; for tears were not
wanting to chequer them, nor many an angry and a bitter thought to
struggle hard against the not unsound philosophy with which she sought
to preserve, for future years, all, out of the bright harvest of her
hopes now blighted, that had escaped the storm. But the tears grew
less frequent, and the bitter pangs of disappointment waxed fainter,
as the minutes flew; and at length, when she had determined how to
shape her course through the rest of life's long and dangerous voyage,
she raised her eyes once more to the heaven above and the landscape
below; and the objects which met her gaze were more marked and noted
now, than they had been not long before.
The change upon the scene, however, was but slight--the same bird was
still tuning its unwearied throat in the tree hard by--the same
unmoving stillness dwelt over the whole view--and not a living object
was to be seen upon the solitary road that wound away through a thinly
peopled part of the much-depopulated realm of France. But the shadows
had grown longer, and the little stream which had lately glistened in
the sunshine, now rested scarcely visible in the brown shade of the
hills; and those changes, slight as they were, to a quick and
imaginative mind like that of Beatrice, might well speak of time's
rapid pace, and man's slow resolves. Stretching forth her hand to a
small silver bell, she rung is sharply; and when the girl Annette
appeared, bade her call Bartholo instantly.
It was not long before the dwarf obeyed the summons; and though he
entered with that air of deference and respect, which was habitual to
him in the presence of Beatrice, yet there was a gleam of satisfaction
in his eye which he could not quell; and which, had she been in her
usual keen and observing state of mind, would not have escaped the
glance of his mistress. But Beatrice scarcely saw him as he stood
before her; but sat with her eyes bent upon the ground, and her busy
thoughts straying sorrowfully over the past.
"You sent for me, Madam," said the dwarf at length; "and I come
joyfully, because I have not been thus honoured of late so often as I
used formerly to be, when Bartholo's scheme, or Bartholo's advice was
well nigh his lady's oracle."
"I have somewhat distrusted thee, Bartholo!" said Beatrice, gravely.
"Many of my plans have failed in thy hands----"
"But by no fault of mine, lady!" cried the dwarf, eagerly. "What have
I done to be distrusted? How have I deserved to lose your confidence?
What secret have I betrayed? How have I acted to frustrate anything
that you proposed?"
"Those, Bartholo," replied the lady, "those who suffer themselves to
be discovered in their art, by open acts or heedless words, are
politicians of a different stuff from that of which thou art made. But
there are such things as looks, and smiles, and frowns, and curlings
of the upper lip, which, to the eye of Beatrice of Ferrara, are often
as legible as a book fairly printed in the language of her native
land. I have somewhat doubted thee; but I may have been deceived--and
God send it may be so! for I would not willingly believe that any one
whom I have nourished with my bread, and have rewarded not only with
dull gold, but also with inestimable favour and affection, would
deceive or betray me; far less could I wish to think, that one who has
known me from infancy, and on whom my parents, as well as myself, have
rained benefits, would wrong my confidence."
"Lady!" replied the dwarf vehemently, "so help me Heaven, as I would
sooner die than do ought that you do not wish, except for your own
good!"
"Ay, there may we bitterly fall out, good Bartholo, if we speak
farther!" replied Beatrice. "What I require is service, and not
judgment of my actions; and henceforth let me but see that you even
waver in obeying, or fulfil not my behest, whatever it may be, to the
very letter, and I will send you from me never to return again.
However, I somewhat doubted thee, and therefore have not trusted thee
in matters where I required uninquiring promptitude and exact
obedience. Those matters now are over, and a smoother trodden path
lies out before me."
Bartholo started, for he had heard and marked much that had passed;
and yet she spoke so calmly, that he deemed it impossible one of her
passionate nature could bear the blight of all her hopes so meekly.
"It has wrung my heart, lady," he said, in a tone of deep despondency,
that touched Beatrice more at this moment than it might have done at
any other, because grief is credulous of grief. "It has wrung my
heart, lady, to have been distrusted by you for an hour, though the
wound would have gone deeper had I deserved it. But you know not,
lady, what it is, when one has been brought up from boyhood near so
bright and good a person as yourself; has been habituated to watch
your every word, to obey you, and to hasten before your wishes to
please you; has become keen of wit and daring of execution for the
sole service of your behests; and has watched you expand from
loveliness to loveliness, like a flower in the spring tide--you know
not what it is to be looked coldly on, even for a moment; to be
distrusted by her whom one would give the inmost heart's best blood to
serve."
The tone touched Beatrice, for it was unlike the dwarf's ordinary
cynicism: but there was something in the words, though they were
respectfully spoken, which did not please her; and she might have
replied more coldly than the kindness of her heart approved, had not
the dwarf gone on rapidly:--"At your birth, lady, I was little more
than twelve years old; and from that hour to this, I have followed
your fortunes and obeyed you in every word, even to quitting you when
you bade me quit you, and taking apparent service, once with a man I
hated, and once with a man I despised; and now I find that you have
distrusted me, you have looked cold upon me, you have kept me from
your presence! Lady, I beseech you, do not so again; rather as you
say, send me from you for ever. Call me to you, and say, 'Bartholo,
thou pleasest me no longer, get thee gone, and take thy stinted and
misshapen form from before my eyes; let me see no more thy apish
countenance! Despised of all the world, thou art despised of me also;
and though the dwarf has been my sport and mockery, has stood in the
place of parrot, or lapdog, or marmoset, I am now tired of the goblin;
so get thee hence!' Say this! say a thousand things more biting and
bitter still, but never, oh never, lady, distrust me again."
"Nay, Bartholo, nay!" replied Beatrice, better pleased with his last
words than those that preceded them. "Thou goest too far, in the
bitterness of thine anger. I have never contemned, I have never
despised thee! and have felt pity for thy fate, less because it truly
deserved pity, than because it grieved thee. As to the past, thou
ownest thyself, that if thou hadst deemed my interest required it,
thou wouldest have betrayed my confidence; I was just, therefore, in
mistrusting thee; but it was thy vanity I doubted--vanity that must
judge of my happiness better than I can myself--and not thy love,
Bartholo, which I do verily believe would seek that happiness for me
at the risk of life."
"Oh! never, never doubt that, lady!" cried the dwarf, casting himself
at her feet, and kissing her hand; "never, never doubt that; for your
utmost trust therein can only do me scanty justice."
Beatrice withdrew her hand. "Enough, enough!" she said. "We understand
each other for the future. You always remember, that I am the best
judge of my own happiness; and I----" He shook his head with a
mournful look, and clasping his hands together, cast his eyes upon the
ground. "What mean you, knave?" cried Beatrice, for his action
interrupted her more than words could have done. "What would you by
that gesture?"
"I would ask, lady," said the dwarf, in a firm but melancholy
tone,--"If you have lately proved yourself so good a judge of your own
happiness? Pardon me, my noble lady! Pardon me! but did I not long
since predict all that has happened? Did I not tell you, when first
you fixed your love on one whose name I will not pronounce, so deeply
do I hate him for his conduct towards you----"
"Hate him not, Bartholo!" interrupted Beatrice, fixing her bright dark
eyes upon the dwarf as she spoke--"hate him not, Bartholo; for I love
him still! and he loves me!"
A bright flush played over the pale cheek of the dwarf, like a gleam
of summer lightning upon the twilight sky, and his nether lip
quivered; but for some moments he made no reply, except by again
clasping his hands together, and gazing down upon the ground, as if in
deep meditation. "Lady!" he said at length, "you love him still! I
doubt it not; for yours is one of those firm hearts, on which a line
once engraved can never be effaced. But alas, alas! he loves not you;
and all your sad experience will not convince you, solely because you
still love him."
"Not so, Bartholo," replied Beatrice. "All my experience convinces me
that he does love me; and I thank God for it, though most likely I
shall never see his face again. Do not interrupt me! For once I
condescend to speak to you of my past and my future actions; but after
this, we mention such things no more. I am not the weak being you
believe me. I placed you in the service of Philip d'Aubin, now years
ago, not that you might act as a spy for me upon each pitiful and
insignificant occurrence of his life, or note every failing or every
falsehood he committed against the vows he had plighted to me; but, on
the contrary, to satisfy myself on two great points, whereon my future
happiness depended, first, whether he loved me, and next, whether he
might not become worthy of my love. When he left Paris and retired
into Maine, shaken by still greater doubts, I determined to watch him
myself more nearly, and made you prepare me an entrance into the
family of his uncle; but it was still for those two great objects that
I risked so much. Circumstances rendered this scheme nearly fruitless:
the death of his uncle, his return towards Paris, his separation from
his cousin, all thwarted me; but still, step by step, and little by
little, his character developed itself before me. At length, hoping
and confiding still, I had the man I loved, followed by my emissaries,
traced from place to place, withdrawn from the fatal battle which
ruined the cause he had espoused, and brought hither as thou knowest.
Here I watched him from sickness unto health. Here the last trait of
his character displayed itself. All is open--all is clear! My two
questions are resolved! I am satisfied. He loves me, Bartholo! He does
love me! But he is unworthy of my love!"
She spoke rapidly and eagerly, but she had by this time regained her
command over herself; and not a tear rose in her eye, as she briefly
touched upon the various efforts which love, deeper, stronger than
even she herself believed, had urged her on to make, and upon the sad
result of all her endeavours. As she ended, indeed, she raised her
eyes to the sky; and, led away by memory, forgot the presence of the
page and the conclusion of her speech, and, gazing out for many
minutes, remained in silent but painful meditation. Still she gave no
way to grief; and, after awhile, again turned towards the dwarf,
saying--"Well, Bartholo, so much for the past! Now for the future. For
eleven long years have I sojourned in this fair realm of France, but
my stay therein draws towards an end. The last tie that bound me to
this place is broken! My soul yearns towards my native land. Bartholo,
I am about to tread back my way to Italy."
"Indeed! indeed!" cried the dwarf, his whole face brightening. "Then
all is right, indeed. But when, lady--oh, tell me when?"
"I knew not that thou wert such a lover of thy native land!" replied
Beatrice, as she gazed upon his small features beaming with a sort of
triumphant joy. "I have heard thee call thyself a citizen of the
world; and vow that nature, when she made thee smaller than the common
race of other countries, by unfitting thee for any, had fitted thee
for all alike. But I see that, smother our feelings however we may,
the love of our own land will not give way so long as memory binds us
to it with the thousand ties of sweet associations and early
happiness. Well, be thy mind at ease! Eight days, eight short days,
and I am on my way hence, unless some unforeseen event delay me. I
have but to withdraw my poor girls from Paris, at least those that
like to follow me; to place the somewhat wasted wealth which I have
here under the protection of the laws, if the laws, indeed, can give
protection now-a-day; to make sure of one point more, which will soon
be settled, and then to depart."
The face of the dwarf, which, during the whole of his interview with
his lady, had been agitated with strong feelings either of
mortification or of joy, now at once resumed the look of calm bitter
cynicism, which, though perhaps more natural to his features, was, at
all events, more habitual. "Ay, lady!" he said, "so it is ever! There
is ever one point more to be made sure of when a lady's love and her
judgment lead her different ways; and that one point more will very
surely keep your steps from Italy. So I will e'en go and sing."
"Knave, thou art somewhat too bold!" cried Beatrice. "I have pampered
thee too much, and made thee insolent; but thou shalt be better taught
in future!"
"Not so, lady, not so!" cried the dwarf, in a deprecatory tone.
"Forgive the first outbreaking of my disappointment. I thought our
journey to Italy sure, when suddenly came that '_one point more_;' and
I know human nature all too well to doubt, that upon one small point
love can raise up such mighty prison-walls, that the best climber, ere
he could escape, would break his neck in the attempt to scale them."
"Like others who fancy they know human nature well," answered
Beatrice, "thou cheatest thyself with thine own imaginations. That one
point more will not detain me here; but whether thy curiosity
regarding it--and which I clearly see--originate in folly or in
policy, it shall not be gratified. Content thyself with what I choose
to tell thee, and ask no more! And now listen to my commands. Make
every preparation for a journey; and in regard to this house, on which
I have wasted so much wealth that might have been better spent, take
order that, if possible, it be guarded against the chances of these
civil wars till peace be again established. You understand what I
would have. When law is once more recognised in France, perchance it
and the hotel in Paris may be sold, and I have nothing more in a land
that I no longer love. Now get thee hence and leave me; but let all
things be done quickly."
The dwarf replied nothing, but retired at once; and Beatrice, after
following him with her eyes to the door, sat for several moments in
silence, with an air of anxious thought. "I doubt that imp!" she said
at length. "I doubt that imp! There has of late been a fire and an
eagerness in his words when he speaks to me that I love not; and I
have remarked that his eyes, when he thinks that mine are not on him,
have a somewhat bold familiarity with my person." And as she thus
thought, a slight shudder passed over her. "I doubt him," she went on;
"and he is bold, and cunning, and politic, to a point rarely reached
by those whose communion with their fellow-men is more extended than
his, and who, consequently, find a thousand things to call their
attention from their darling schemes. I doubt him, and will have him
watched! I fear he may have betrayed me already, but he shall do so no
more. Annette!" she cried aloud, "Annette!"
The girl appeared, and her mistress bade her send Joachim to her. Some
minutes then elapsed; but at length appeared the old man who had so
skilfully managed the little comedy which had enabled Beatrice and
Eugenie de Menancourt to pass the gates of Paris. "Joachim!" said his
mistress, as he entered, "have a strict watch put upon the dwarf
Bartholo: I doubt him; I doubt his faith and honesty."
"And so do I, lady," replied the man. "I myself heard you command him
not to show himself in the sight of the Count d'Aubin, and to my
certain knowledge he visited him alone in his chamber."
"Indeed!" said Beatrice, thoughtfully; "indeed! That may mean much!
But have him watched, without making it apparent. Quick, Joachim! You,
at least, I can trust."
"You may, dear lady!" replied the old man, laying his hand upon his
breast; and then, bowing low, he left Beatrice to long, deep, anxious
thought.