In a Winter City/Chapter 9

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

CHAPTER IX.

The next morning they brought her a note; it said that he had inquired about the San Cipriano, but the matter had to be referred to some authority absent in Rome, and there could be no answer for a few days, perhaps weeks; the note was signed with the assurance of the highest consideration of the humblest of her servants,—Paolo della Rocca.

The note might have been read from the housetop: she had had letters from him of a different strain; charming little brief letters, about a flower, about an opera-box, about a piece of pottery, always about some trifle, but making the trifle the medium of a delicately-veiled homage, and a softly-hinted tenderness.

She tossed the note into the fire, and saw his name burn in the clear flame of a pine branch: why could he not have called instead of writing?

She was restless all day, and nothing pleased her:—not even M. de St. Louis, who did call and sat a long time, and was in his most delightful humour, and full of new anecdotes about everybody and everything:—but he did not mention Della Rocca.

The Duc found no topic that suited her. It was the Corso di Gala that afternoon, would she not go?

No: her horses hated masks, and she hated noise.

The Veglione on Sunday—would she not go to that?

No: those things were well enough in the days of Philippe d'Orléans, who invented them, but they were only now as stupid as they were vulgar; anybody was let in for five francs.

Did she like the new weekly journal, that was electrifying Paris?

No: she could see nothing in it: there was no wit now-a-days—only personalities, which grew more gross every year.

The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and Archilochus, and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of Hipponax drove Bupalus to hang himself.

She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.

People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere, called "In a Hothouse," the hothouse being society—had she seen it?

No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never had been in it? The last English "society" novel she had read had described a cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in the crowd, with everybody else, instead of by the petite entrée; they were always full of such blunders.

Had she read the new French story "Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi?"

No: she had heard too much of it; it made you almost wish for a Censorship of the Press.

The Duc agreed that literature was terribly but truly described as "un tas d'ordures soigneusement enveloppé."

She said that the "tas d'ordures" without the envelope was sufficient for popularity, but that the literature of any age was not to be blamed—it was only a natural growth, like a mushroom; if the soil were noxious, the fungus was bad.

The Duc wondered what a censorship would let pass if there were one.

She said that when there was one it had let pass Crebillon, the Chevalier Le Clos, and the "Bijoux Indiscrets;" it had proscribed Marmontel, Helvetius, and Lanjuinais. She did not know how one man could be expected to be wiser than all his generation.

The Duc admired some majolica she had purchased.

She said she began to think that majolica was a false taste; the metallic lustre was fine, but how clumsy the forms; one might be led astray by too great love of old work.

The Duc praised a magnificent Sèvres panel, just painted by Riocreux and Goupil, and given to her by Princess Olga on the New Year.

She said it was well done, but what charm was there in it? All their modern iron and zinc colours, and hydrate of aluminum, and oxide of chromium, and purple of Cassius, and all the rest of it, never gave one-tenth the charm of those old painters who had only green greys and dull blues and tawny yellows, and never could get any kind of red whatever; Olga had meant to please her, but she, for her part, would much sooner have had a little panel of Abruzzi, with all the holes and defects in the pottery, and a brown contadina for a Madonna; there was some interest in that,—there was no interest in that gorgeous landscape and those brilliant hunting figures.

The Duc bore all the contradictions with imperturbable serenity and urbanity, smiled to himself, and bowed himself out in perfect good humour.

"Tout va bien," he thought to himself; "Miladi must be very much in love to be so cross."

The Duc's personal experience amongst ladies had made him of opinion that love did not improve the temper.

"The carriage waits, Miladi," said her servant.

"I shall not drive to-day," said Lady Hilda. "Tell them to saddle Saïd."

It was a brilliant day; all the bells were pealing; and the sunshine and the soft wind streaming in. She thought a ten-mile stretch across the open country might do her good; at any rate, it would be better than sitting at home, or pacing slowly in the procession of the Corso di Gala, which was only a shade less stupid than the pelting Corso.

Saïd was a swift, nervous, impetuous horse; the only sort of horse she cared to ride; and he soon bore her beyond the gates, leaving the carriages of her friends to crush each other in the twisting streets, and vie in state liveries and plumes and ribbons and powdered servants, and amuse the good-natured, kindly, orderly crowds of Floralia, clustered on the steps of churches and under the walls of palaces.

She rode against the wind, as straight as the state of the roads would permit her, as wonderful a sight to the astonished country people as though she had been S. Margarita on her dragon. Saïd took a few stone walls and sunkened fences, which put him on good terms with himself. She was in no mood to spare him, or avoid any risks it might amuse him to run; and they had soon covered many more miles than she knew.

"Where are we?" she asked her groom, when Saïd slackened his pace at last.

The. groom, who was a Scotchman, had no idea and no power of asking.

"It does not matter," said his mistress, and rode on again.

They were on a tolerably broad road, with a village above them, on a steep green vine-clad hill; there were the usual olive orchards everywhere, with great almond trees full of blossom and white as driven snow, and farther still all around the countless curves of the many mountain spurs that girdle the valley of Floralia. There was another stone wall in front of them; beyond it the turf looked fresh and pleasant; she put Saïd at it, but someone from a distance called out to her in Italian, "For God's sake stop the horse!"

On the other side of the wall the ground fell suddenly to a depth of twenty feet.

She caught up Saïd's head in time only by a moment; he stood erect on his hind legs a second, but she kept her seat unshaken; she thought he would lose his balance and fall back on her; but she stilled and controlled him with the coolest nerve. As he descended on his front feet, Della Rocca came through a high iron gate on the left, leapt a ditch, and sprang to the horse's head.

"How can you do such mad things?" he said, with a quiver in his voice. "That gate was locked; I could only shout to you. I thought I was too late———"

His face was pale as death; her colour had not even changed. She looked at him and smiled a little.

"So many thanks—it is a silly habit taking walls; I learned to like it when I was a child, and rode with my brother. Saïd is not frightened now; you may let him alone. Where are we?"

"On the ground of Palestrina."

"Palestrina! I see nothing of your villa."

"We are eight miles from the villa. It lies beyond those other hills—but all the ground here is mine. I was visiting one of my farms. By heaven's mercy I saw you———"

His voice still faltered, and his face was pale with strong emotion; his hand had closed on hers, and rested on her knee.

"You were behind that tall gate then?"

"Yes; I have the key of that gate, but the lock was rusted. Come and rest a moment, you are a long way from Floralia. There is an old farmhouse here; they are all my own people."

She dismounted and threw the bridle to her groom.

"It terrifies you more than it did me," she said, with a little laugh.

He took both her hands and kissed them; he did not answer, neither did she rebuke him.

He led her through the iron gate down a grassy path between the grey gnarled olive trees and the maples with their lithe red boughs; there was a large old house with clouds of pigeons round it, and great mulberry trees near, and sculptured shields and lions on the walls; women ran to him delightedly, men left their ploughs afar off and came, eager and bareheaded, to see if there was any chance to serve him; he was their prince, their lord, their idol, their best friend; as their fathers had followed his to the death, so would they have followed him. Half a dozen flew to do each word of his bidding; brought in the horse, brought out an oaken settle for her in the sun, brought fresh water from the spring, fresh lemons from the tree, fresh violets from the hedges. At a sign from him one of the shepherd-boys, who was famous for his singing, came and stood before them, and sang to his guitar some of the love-songs of the province in a sweet tenor voice, liquid as the singing of nightingales. The green and gracious country was around, the low sun made the skies of the west radiant, the smell of the woods and fields rose fresh from the earth. She drank the draught he made for her, and listened to the singing, and watched the simple pastoral, old-world life around her, and felt her heart thrill as she met the amorous worship of his eyes.

She had never thought of natural beauty, or of the lives of the poor, save now and then when they had been recalled to her by some silvery landscape of Corot, or some sad rural idyl of Millet; as she sat here, she felt as if she had passed all her life in some gorgeous heated theatre, and had only now come out into the open air, and under the arch of heaven.

There was a wonderful dreamy, lulling charm in this olive-hidden solitude; she did not care to move, to think, to analyze. He did not speak to her of love; they both avoided words, which, spoken, might break the spell of their present peace and part them; but every now and then his eyes looked into hers, and were heavy with the langour of silent passion, and stirred her heart to strange sweet tumult.

When the boy sang the passionate, plaintive love-songs, then her face grew warm, and her eyelids fell—it was no longer an unknown tongue to her.

She would not think of the future—she resigned herself to the charm of the hour.

So also did he.

The night before he had resolved to avoid her, to cease to see her, to forget her. She had wounded him, and he had told himself that it was best to let the world have her, body and soul. Now chance had overruled his resolve: he could not war with his fate—he let it come as it might. He had found his way to influence her; he knew that he could move her as no other could; yet he hesitated to say to her what must unite them or part them.

Besides, since this woman had grown dear to him with a passion born alike out of her physical beauty and his own sense of power on her, and his insight into the richer possibilities of her nature, the colder calculations which had occupied him at his first knowledge of her seemed to him base and unworthy: if he had not loved her he would have pursued her with no pang of conscience; having grown to love her, to love her loveliness, and her pride, and her variableness, and her infinite charm, and her arrogant faults, to love her in a word, and to desire indescribably to lead her from the rank miasma of the pleasures and pomps of the world into a clearer and higher spiritual atmosphere, he recoiled more and more, day by day, from seeking her as the medium of his own fortune, he checked himself more and more in the utterance of a passion which could but seem to her mingled at the least with the lowest of motives.

He was her lover, he did not disguise it from himself or her; but he paused before doing that which would make him win or lose it all; not because he feared his fate, but because he could not bring himself to the acceptance of it.

"Sing me something yourself," she said to him; and he took the boy's mandolin and, leaning against the porch of the house, touched a chord of it now and then, and sang her every thing she would, while the sun shone in the silver of the olives and the afternoon shadows stole slowly down the side of the mountains. Then he sat down on the steps at her feet, and talked to her of his people, of his land, of his boyhood and his youth.

"I have lived very much in the great world," he said, after a time. "This world which you think is the only one. But I am never so well content as when I come back here under my olives. I suppose you cannot understand that?"

"I am not sure—yes, perhaps. One grows tired of everything," she answered with a little sigh.

"Everything that is artificial, you mean. People think Horace's love of the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After the strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan Court, the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to him. I know it is the fashion to say that a love of Nature belongs only to the Moderns, but I do not think so. Into Pindar, Theocritus, Meleager, the passion for Nature must have entered very strongly; what is modern is the more subjective, the more fanciful, feeling which makes Nature a sounding-board to echo all the cries of man."

"But that is always a northern feeling?"

"Inevitably. With us Nature is too riante for us to grow morbid about it. The sunshine that laughs around us nine months of every year, the fruits that grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw to the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very sea sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow up amongst from infancy makes our love of Nature only a kind of unconscious joy in it—but here even the peasant has that, and the songs of the men that cannot read or write are full of it. If a field labourer sing to his love he will sing of the narcissus and the crocus, as Meleager sang to Heliodora twenty centuries ago———"

"And your wild narcissus is the true narcissus; the Greek narcissus, with its many bells to one stem?"

"Yes. In March and April it will be out everywhere in the fields and woods about here. I thought once that you loved flowers as you loved art, merely as a decoration of your salon. But I was wrong. They are closer to your heart than that. Why do you deny your emotions? Why do you mask yourself under such cold phrases as those you used to me yesterday?"

She smiled a little.

"How should I remember what I said so long back as yesterday?"

"That is hard!—for those who hear may remember for a lifetime. Your words kept me from where you were last night."

"What I say at any time is worth but little thought I fear you think too well of me always," she said, on a sudden vague impulse and the first pang of humility that she had ever allowed to smite the superb vanity that had always enwrapped her.

With a soft grace of action he touched with his lips the hem of her riding skirt.

"No," he said simply, "you might indeed 'daze one to blindness like the noonday sun.' But I am not blind. I see in you many errors, more against yourself than others; I see the discontent which always argues high unsatisfied desire, and the caprice which is merely the offshoot of too long indulgence of all passing fancies; but what matter these?—your nature and the nobility of it lie underneath them in a vein of gold unworked. You have had the language of flattery to nausea: I do not give it you; I say but what I believe."

The tears sprang into her eyes, and the music of his voice thrilled through her.

She did not care to wait for the words that she knew would follow as his fingers stole and clasped hers close, and she felt on her the gaze she did not dare to meet. She rose, and glanced to the west.

"The sun is just gone behind the hills. I shall be late. Will you tell them to bring me Saïd?'

He rose, too, and did not oppose her departure.

"I rode here myself, fortunately," he said. "You must allow me to go with you into Moralia; the roads are bad and hard to find."

They brought Saïd out of the great wooden sweet-smelling outhouse, and he raised her in silence to her saddle. He gave her a little knot of the fragrant leafless calycanthus with a few sprays of myrtle; she put it in her bosom; it was already dusk, and he saw the softened dimness of her eyes.

They rode down together in the declining light through the winding ways of the outlying country into, the town; it was quite dark when they reached the gates; they had ridden fast and spoken scarcely at all.

As he lifted her from Saïd in the gloom within the scarcely lighted street, he pressed her softly for one second in his arms, so that she felt the beating of his heart.

"A rive derci!" he murmured.

She left him in silence, and without rebuke.

"Is that you, Duca?" said the voice of Madame Mila in the darkness, as a carriage, gorgeous with amber and gold liveries and with Carnival camellias at the horses' heads, pulled up with great noise and haste before the hotel door.

"Is that you, Duca? I am so glad; I wanted to speak to you. The Corso was horridly stupid. I don't care a bit except for the pelting days, do you. I sprained my arm last year in Borne with the pelting, and I really blinded poor Salvareo for a week. Why, dear me, that's Saïd! Have you and Hilda been riding together?"

"I met your cousin, Madame, by chance; she had lost her way. It is very easy to do so amongst our hills."

"How very fortunate that you met her!" said Madame Mila, with a little saucy laugh. "She will kill herself riding that horrid Saïd some day—perhaps she will listen to you if you tell her not. What was it I wanted to say,—oh, I want a very good box for the Veglione. You are one of the directors of the opera, are you not?"

"Yes."

"I thought so. Well, mind I have one; big enough to hold the supper table comfortably; and see Maurice about it, and dine with me tomorrow, will you? Nina and Olga and the usual people. Dear me, how these horses do fidget. How very nice that you should have met dear Hilda just when she'd lost her way!

Good bye; but, of course, you'll be at the Roubleskoffs' to-night? I wish it wasn't costume. I'm England, and I'm embroidered all over with Union Jacks; and I have a little Khedive on a gold stick that keeps tumbling up and down; and I carry a ship in full sail on the top of my head. I assure you it's very trying to be a Naval Power. How ever I shall be able to waltz with that ship!———" Della Rocca rode away in the darkness, as the skirts of Madame Mila vanished in the hotel doorway with the gleam of the golden-pheasant trimmings shining under the gas lamp.

He went home to his solitary dinner, and scarcely touched it, and barely even noticed his dog. He sat alone a long time, thinking, in the same room where, four months before, he had pondered on the Duc de St. Louis's counsels, and had decided to himself that this woman, beautiful though she was, was arrogant, unimpressionable, extravagantly capricious, and in every way antagonistic to him.

Now, he was passionately in love with her himself; he knew that she was deeply moved by him; he believed that he had only to ask and have; and yet he hesitated.

It was the marriage of all other marriages for him; he had softened and subdued her in a manner which could not but intoxicate his vanity, though he had less vanity than most men; he did not distrust her character, because he believed that there was a vague lofty nobility in it, and a latent, though untouched, tenderness; of her caprices, of her changefulness, of her moods of contempt, and of impatience, he had no fear; he would substitute other emotions for them. And yet he hesitated; he was unresolved; he was doubtful whether to accept the empire he had obtained.

He would have concluded a marriage of interest as coldly and tranquilly as any other man with a woman to whom he was indifferent. But with this woman whose mere touch thrilled him to the heart, and whose imperious eyes had only grown gentle for his sake!—never had he felt his poverty so painfully as in this moment when supreme Fortune seemed to have smiled upon him.

Though he loved her with passion, he almost wished that he had never seen her face.

After all, though generous, she was arrogant;—sooner or later she might make him feel that the golden sceptre was hers and not his. To his temper, which, although gentle, was deeply in- grained with the pride which had been transmitted to him from many generations of a feudal nobility, such a possibility seemed unendurable. He sat still lost in thought till his lamp grew low, and the wind rising loud, shook the leaded panes of the old high windows.

"I suppose when Fortune does smile at us, we always quarrel with her so," he thought, with some impatience of his own irresolution.

After all, what other man in Europe would not have been content? He got up, caressed the dog, turned the lamp higher, and went into his bed-chamber.

"Get out the white mousquetaire dress," he said to his old servant. "I will go to the Roubleskoff ball."

All patrician Floralia was at the Roubleskoff ball, one of the last great entertainments of the expiring Carnival. In six more days there would come the Day of Ashes; and Floralia would repent her sins in sadness,—that is, with only musical parties, a dinner here and there, and no suppers at all; (perhaps a ball might be squeezed in once or twice by grace of the Russian Calendar, but, then, if you took advantage of that you were brouillé with all the codini at once).

He reached the Roubleskoff villa late, not so late but what he was in time to see the arrival of the woman who had sat with him at her feet, and talked with him of Meleager and the white narcissus flowers.

Lady Hilda entered like a sovereign, and drew all eyes on herself.

She was attired as Vittoria Colonna, and carried her purples and cloth of gold with more than royal grace; the colour on her cheek was heightened, her eyes had a dewy brilliancy; what they spoke to her she seemed hardly to hear.

He was as her shadow all the evening.

They were both feverishly happy; both curiously troubled. Neither cared to look onward.

Society there assembled said that it was a great thing for the Duca della Rocca; and wondered whether they would live most in Floralia or Paris.

"C'est moi qui a inspiré cela," said the Duc de St. Louis, with much self-complacency, sitting down to the whist table; he was quite sure that all was right; he had seen the look in the eyes of both of them.

"She will compromise herself at last. Oh, what a comfort it will be!" thought little Madame Mila, carrying her frigate in, full sail airily through the mazes of the cotillon, with a sleeveless bodice on, cut so low that it was really as good—or as bad—as if she had had nothing at all. She did not wish any harm, of course, only, really, Hilda, with a lover like other people, would be so much more natural and agreeable.

"But they will marry, people say," suggested M. des Gommeux, to whom alone she confided these ideas.

"When do people ever say anything that is true?" said Madame Mila, with profound contempt, tossing her little head till the Naval Power of England was in jeopardy. She was irritated to hear Maurice even talk about marriage; it was an improper thing for him even to mention, considering his relation to herself. When he approached any young girl or marriageable woman of any sort, Madame Mila bristled like a little angry terrier that sees a cat; on the whole, she was still more exacting than Mlles. Rose Thè and Boulotte, and whereas in society he could escape from them, he could in nowise escape from her.

If it had been a question of marriage for her cousin, indeed, Madame Mila would have opposed it tooth and nail; she had a feeling, a very accurate one, that Della Rocca did not approve of herself, and that he would certainly never allow his wife, if he had one, to be very intimate with her. But Madame Mila knew what other people did not; that there could be no question of such a marriage for her cousin; and so she smiled on Della Rocca, and was always engaging him to dinner; because Lady Hilda, with her lover about her, like any one else, would be so much more humanized and natural, and would sympathise so much better with other people.

That kind of virtue of Hilda's—if it were virtue—was such an odd, chilly, unpleasant thing, she thought; to live in that way, with hundreds of men seeking her, and cold alike to them all, was something so very unnatural; it was almost as bad as being one of those queer women who wouldn't tie their skirts back, or wear high heels, or dress their hair properly:—it was so strange, too, in a person who, in all other matters, was the very queen of fashion, the very head and front of the most perfect worldliness.

It was very late and daylight quite when Lady Hilda, contrary to her custom, left the ball; she had been happy with a warmth and feverishness of happiness altogether new to her; nothing more had passed between them, but they had been together all the night, although never alone.

She stood a moment in the doorway facing the daylight. Most women are ruined by such a test; she looked but the fairer for it, with the sunrise flush touching her cheeks, and the pearls and the diamonds in her hair.

"I may come to you early," he murmured, as she paused that instant on the step.

"Yes—no. No: I shall be tired. Wait till the evening. You are coming to Mila."

The words were a denial; but on her lips there was sweetness, and in her eyes a soft emotion as she moved onward and downward to the carriage.

He was not dissatisfied nor dismayed. As he drew the furs over her gold-laden skirts, his head bore lower and lower, and his lips touched her hand and her arm.

"The sun is up. I never am so late as this," she said, as though she did not feel those kisses; but, by the clear light of the day-dawn, he saw the blood mantle over her throat and bosom, and the tremulous shadow of a smile move her mouth.

The horses sprang forward; he stood on the lower step, grave and lost in thought.

"Is it too early to offer felicitations, my friend?" said the Duc de St. Louis, passing to go homeward; he had been playing whist all night.

"I do not understand you," he answered, with the tranquil falsehood of society.

The question annoyed him deeply. He loved this woman with all the tenderness and passion of his temperament, and loved her the more for the ascendency he had gained over her and the faults that he saw in her; he loved her generously, truly, and with purer desire than most men. Yet what would his love for her ever look to the world?—since he was poor.

Meanwhile she, with her fair hair tumbled about her pillows, and her gorgeous cloth of gold lying on a couch like a queen's robes abandoned, slept restlessly, yet with a smile on her face, some few hours: when she awoke it was with a smile, and with that vague sweet sense of awakening to some great joy, which is one of the most precious gifts of happiness; dreamful misty sense of expectation and recollections blending in one, and making the light of day beautiful.

She lay still some time, awake, and yet dreaming, with half-closed eyelids and her thick hair loosened and covering her shoulders, and the sweet scent close at hand of a glassful of myrtle and calycanthus, that she had been very careful to tell them to set near her bed. Lazily, after awhile, she rang a little bell, and bade her maids open her shutters, the grand light of the noonday poured into the chamber.

"Give me a mirror," she said to them.

When they gave her one, she looked at herself and smiled again: she was one of those women who are lovely when they wake: there are not many.

They brought her her chocolate, and she sipped a little of it, and lay still, looking at the myrtle and hearing the ringing of church bells from across the water; she was happy; it seemed to her that all her life before had not been happiness after all;—only pleasure.

An hour later her maid brought her a telegram. She opened it with a little impatience. Why should anything break in on her day dream?

It merely said that her brother was in Paris, and would come onward; and be with her that night. She let the papers fall, as though she were stung by an adder.

It recalled to her what she had forgotten.