To her cousin “nearly twenty.”
And counting the candles, I perceived they were nineteen.
Probably my joy was somewhat tempered by confusion, to think that my
little equivocation on the subject of my age had been discovered. As
I looked up from the cake to its giver, I met a pair of eyes that were
gleaming with mischievous raillery; and she shook her head at me, and
murmured, “Oh, you fibber!”
“How on earth did you find out?” I wondered.
“Oh—a little bird,” laughed she.
“I don’t think it’s at all respectful of you to call Aunt
Elizabeth a little bird,” said I.
After dinner we went out upon the terrace. It was a warm night, and
there was a moon. A moonlit night in Italy—dark velvet shot with
silver. And the air was intoxicant with the scent of hyacinths. We
were in March; the garden had become a wilderness of spring flowers,
narcissuses and jonquils, crocuses, anemones, tulips, and hyacinths;
hyacinths, everywhere hyacinths. Rosalys had thrown a bit of white lace
over her hair. Oh, I assure you, in the moonlight, with the white lace
over her hair, with her pale face, and her eyes, her shining, mysterious
eyes—oh, I promise you, she was lovely.
“How beautiful the garden is, in the moonlight, isn’t it?” she
said. “The shadows, and the statues, and the fountains. And how sweet
the air is. They’re the hyacinths that smell so sweet. The hyacinth is
your birthday flower, you know. Hyacinths bring happiness to people born
in March.”
I looked into her eyes, and my heart thrilled and thrilled. And then,
somehow, somehow... Oh, I don’t remember what I said; only somehow,
somehow... Ah, but I do remember very clearly what she answered—so
softly, so softly, while her hand lay in mine. I remember it very
clearly, and at the memory, even now, years afterwards, I confess my
heart thrills again.
We were joined, in a minute or two, by Monsignor Parlaghi, and we tried
to behave as if he were not unwelcome.
Adam and Eve were driven from Eden for their guilt; but it was Innocence
that lost our Eden for Rosalys and me. In our egregious innocence, we
had determined that I should call upon Aunt Elizabeth in the morning,
and formally demand her sanction to our engagement! Do I need to
recount the history of that interview? Of my aunt’s incredulity,
that gradually changed to scorn and anger? Of how I was fleered at and
flouted, and taunted with my youth, and called a fool and a coxcomb,
and sent about my business with the information that the portals of the
Palazzo Zacchinelli would remain eternally closed against me for the
future, and that my people “would be written to”? I was not even
allowed to see my cousin to say good-bye. “And mind you, we’ll have
no letter writing,” cried Aunt Elizabeth. “I shall forbid Rosalys to
receive any letters from you.”
Guilt (we are taught) can be annulled, and its punishment remitted,
if we do heartily repent. But innocence? Goodness knows how heartily
I repented; yet I never found that a pennyweight of the punishment was
remitted. At the week’s end I got a letter from my people recalling me
to Paris. And I never saw Rosalys again. And some years afterwards she
married an Italian, a nephew of Cardinal Badascalchi. And in 1887, at
Viareggio, she died....
Eh bien, voilà! There is the little inachieved, the little unfulfilled
romance, written for me in her name, Cousin Rosalys. What of it? Oh,
nothing—except—except... Oh, nothing. “All good things come to him
who waits.” Perhaps. But we know how apt they are to come too late;
and—sometimes they come too early.