The parts of "Oke of Okehurst" are misnumbered beginning with Part
III
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BY
(dedication)
TO FLORA PRIESTLEY AND ARTHUR LEMON Are Dedicated DIONEA, AMOUR DURE,
AND THESE PAGES OF INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGY.
(preface)
And this leads me to say, that it seems to me that the supernatural, in
order to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors and
terrible but delicious to ourselves, sceptical posterity, must necessarily,
and with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped in mystery. Indeed,
'tis the mystery that
touches us, the vague shroud of moonbeams that hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on the warrior's breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, while the figure itself wanders forth, scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from the surrounding trees; or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into the flickering shadows.
A number of ingenious persons of our day, desirous of a
pocket-superstition, as men of yore were greedy of a pocket-saint to carry
about in gold and enamel, a number of highly reasoning men of semi-science
have returned to the notion of our fathers, that ghosts have an existence
outside our own fancy and emotion; and have culled from the experience of
some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years ago, being nine years of age, saw her
maiden aunt appear six months after decease, abundant proof of this fact.
One feels glad to think the maiden aunt should have walked about after
death, if it afforded her any satisfaction, poor soul! but one is struck by
the extreme uninterestingness of this lady's appearance in the spirit,
corresponding perhaps to her want of charm while in the flesh. Altogether
one quite agrees, having duly perused the collection of evidence on the
subject, with the wisdom of these modern ghost-experts, when they affirm
that you can always tell a genuine ghost-story by the circumstance of its
being about a nobody, its having
no point or picturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, flat, stale, and unprofitable.
A genuine ghost-story! But then they are not genuine ghost-stories,
those tales that tingle through our additional sense, the sense of the
supernatural, and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strange perfume
of witchgarden flowers.
No, alas! neither the story of the murdered King of Denmark (murdered
people, I am told, usually stay quiet, as a scientific fact), nor of that
weird woman who saw King James the Poet three times with his shroud wrapped
ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronze Venus closing over
the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in verse patterned like some
tapestry, or by Mérimée in terror of cynical reality, or
droned by the original mediæval professional storyteller, none of
these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these ghosts, only in our
minds, in the minds of those dead folk; they have never stumbled and
fumbled about, with Jemima Jackson's maiden aunt, among the arm-chairs
and rep sofas of reality.
They are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from
the strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our
fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid impressions,
litter of multi-coloured tatters, and faded herbs and flowers, whence
arises that
odour (we all know it), musty and damp, but penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air when the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickering flames of candle and fire start up once more after waning.
The genuine ghost? And is not this he, or she, this one born of
ourselves, of the weird places we have seen, the strange stories we have
heard--this one, and not the aunt of Miss Jemima Jackson? For what
use, I entreat you to tell me, is that respectable spinster's vision?
Was she worth seeing, that aunt of hers, or would she, if followed, have
led the way to any interesting brimstone or any endurable beatitude?
The supernatural can open the caves of Jamschid and scale the ladder of
Jacob: what use has it got if it land us in Islington or Shepherd's
Bush? It is well known that Dr. Faustus, having been offered any ghost he
chose, boldly selected, for Mephistopheles to convey, no less a person than
Helena of Troy. Imagine if the familiar fiend had summoned up some Miss
Jemima Jackson's Aunt of Antiquity!
That is the thing--the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which
the prose is clean obliterated by distance--that is the place to get
our ghosts from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of modern
times, on the borderland of the Past, in houses looking down on its
troubadours'
orchards and Greek folks' pillared courtyards; and a legion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro, fetching and carrying for us between it and the Present.
Hence, my four little tales are of no genuine ghosts in the scientific
sense; they tell of no hauntings such as could be contributed by the
Society for Psychical Research, of no spectres that can be caught in
definite places and made to dictate judicial evidence. My ghosts are what
you call spurious ghosts (according to me the only genuine ones), of whom I
can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have
haunted, among others, my own and my friends'--yours, dear Arthur
Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, among the high growing bracken and the
spectral pines, of the south country; and yours, amidst the mist of
moonbeams and olive-branches, dear Flora Priestley, while the moonlit sea
moaned and rattled against the mouldering walls of the house whence Shelley
set sail for eternity.
VERNON LEE.
MAIANO, near FLORENCE,
June 1889.
Is this folly? Is it falsehood? Am I not myself a product of modern,
northern civilisation; is not my coming to Italy due to this very modern
scientific vandalism, which has given me a travelling scholarship because I
have written a book like all those other atrocious books of erudition and
art-criticism? Nay, am I not here at Urbania on the express understanding that, in a certain number of months, I shall produce just another such book? Dost thou imagine, thou miserable Spiridion, thou Pole grown into the semblance of a German pedant, doctor of philosophy, professor even, author of a prize essay on the despots of the fifteenth century, dost thou imagine that thou, with thy ministerial letters and proof-sheets in thy black professorial coat-pocket, canst ever come in spirit into the presence of the Past?
Too true, alas! But let me forget it, at least, every now and then; as I
forgot it this afternoon, while the white bullocks dragged my gig slowly
winding along interminable valleys, crawling along interminable hill-sides,
with the invisible droning torrent far below, and only the bare grey and
reddish peaks all around, up to this town of Urbania, forgotten of mankind,
towered and battlemented on the high Apennine ridge. Sigillo, Penna,
Fossombrone, Mercatello, Montemurlo--each single village name, as the
driver pointed it out, brought to my mind the recollection of some battle
or some great act of treachery of former days. And as the huge mountains
shut out the setting sun, and the valleys filled with bluish shadow and
mist, only a band of threatening smoke-red remaining behind the towers and
cupolas of the city on its mountain-top, and the sound of church bells
floated across the precipice from
Urbania, I almost expected, at every turning of the road, that a troop of horsemen, with beaked helmets and clawed shoes, would emerge, with armour glittering and pennons waving in the sunset. And then, not two hours ago, entering the town at dusk, passing along the deserted streets, with only a smoky light here and there under a shrine or in front of a fruit-stall, or a fire reddening the blackness of a smithy; passing beneath the battlements and turrets of the palace.... Ah, that was Italy, it was the Past!
August 21st.--And this is the Present! Four letters of introduction
to deliver, and an hour's polite conversation to endure with the
Vice-Prefect, the Syndic, the Director of the Archives, and the good man to
whom my friend Max had sent me for lodgings....
August 22nd-27th.--Spent the greater part of the day in the
Archives, and the greater part of my time there in being bored to
extinction by the Director thereof, who to-day spouted Æneas
Sylvius' Commentaries for three-quarters of an hour without taking
breath. From this sort of martyrdom (what are the sensations of a former
racehorse being driven in a cab? If you can conceive them, they are those
of a Pole turned Prussian professor) I take refuge in long rambles through
the town. This town is a handful of tall black houses huddled on to the top
of an Alp, long narrow lanes trickling down its sides, like the slides we
made on hillocks
in our boyhood, and in the middle the superb red brick structure, turreted and battlemented, of Duke Ottobuono's palace, from whose windows you look down upon a sea, a kind of whirlpool, of melancholy grey mountains. Then there are the people, dark, bushy-bearded men, riding about like brigands, wrapped in green-lined cloaks upon their shaggy pack-mules; or loitering about, great, brawny, low-headed youngsters, like the parti-coloured bravos in Signorelli's frescoes; the beautiful boys, like so many young Raphaels, with eyes like the eyes of bullocks, and the huge women, Madonnas or St. Elizabeths, as the case may be, with their clogs firmly poised on their toes and their brass pitchers on their heads, as they go up and down the steep black alleys. I do not talk much to these people; I fear my illusions being dispelled. At the corner of a street, opposite Francesco di Giorgio's beautiful little portico, is a great blue and red advertisement, representing an angel descending to crown Elias Howe, on account of his sewing-machines; and the clerks of the Vice-Prefecture, who dine at the place where I get my dinner, yell politics, Minghetti, Cairoli, Tunis, ironclads, &c., at each other, and sing snatches of La Fille de Mme. Angot, which I imagine they have been performing here recently.
No; talking to the natives is evidently a dangerous experiment. Except
indeed, perhaps, to my good landlord, Signor Notaro Porri, who is just as
learned,
and takes considerably less snuff (or rather brushes it off his coat more often) than the Director of the Archives. I forgot to jot down (and I feel I must jot down, in the vain belief that some day these scraps will help, like a withered twig of olive or a three-wicked Tuscan lamp on my table, to bring to my mind, in that hateful Babylon of Berlin, these happy Italian days)--I forgot to record that I am lodging in the house of a dealer in antiquities. My window looks up the principal street to where the little column with Mercury on the top rises in the midst of the awnings and porticoes of the market-place. Bending over the chipped ewers and tubs full of sweet basil, clove pinks, and marigolds, I can just see a corner of the palace turret, and the vague ultramarine of the hills beyond. The house, whose back goes sharp down into the ravine, is a queer up-and-down black place, whitewashed rooms, hung with the Raphaels and Francias and Peruginos, whom mine host regularly carries to the chief inn whenever a stranger is expected; and surrounded by old carved chairs, sofas of the Empire, embossed and gilded wedding-chests, and the cupboards which contain bits of old damask and embroidered altar-cloths scenting the place with the smell of old incense and mustiness; all of which are presided over by Signor Porri's three maiden sisters--Sora Serafina, Sora Lodovica, and Sora Adalgisa--the three Fates in person, even to the distaffs and their black cats.
Sor Asdrubale, as they call my landlord, is also a notary. He regrets
the Pontifical Government, having had a cousin who was a Cardinal's
train-bearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, light four
candles made of dead men's fat, and perform certain rites about which
he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar nights,
summon up San Pasquale Baylon, who will write you the winning numbers of
the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have previously slapped
him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias. The difficulty consists
in obtaining the dead men's fat for the candles, and also in slapping
the saint before he have time to vanish.
"If it were not for that," says Sor Asdrubale, "the
Government would have had to suppress the lottery ages
ago--eh!"
Sept. 9th.--This history of Urbania is not without its romance,
although that romance (as usual) has been overlooked by our Dryasdusts.
Even before coming here I felt attracted by the strange figure of a woman,
which appeared from out of the dry pages of Gualterio's and Padre de
Sanctis' histories of this place. This woman is Medea, daughter of
Galeazzo IV. Malatesta, Lord of Carpi, wife first of Pierluigi Orsini, Duke
of Stimigliano, and subsequently of Guidalfonso II., Duke of Urbania,
predecessor of the great Duke Robert II.
This woman's history and character remind one
of that of Bianca Cappello, and at the same time of Lucrezia Borgia. Born in 1556, she was affianced at the age of twelve to a cousin, a Malatesta of the Rimini family. This family having greatly gone down in the world, her engagement was broken, and she was betrothed a year later to a member of the Pico family, and married to him by proxy at the age of fourteen. But this match not satisfying her own or her father's ambition, the marriage by proxy was, upon some pretext, declared null, and the suit encouraged of the Duke of Stimigliano, a great Umbrian feudatory of the Orsini family. But the bridegroom, Giovanfrancesco Pico, refused to submit, pleaded his case before the Pope, and tried to carry off by force his bride, with whom he was madly in love, as the lady was most lovely and of most cheerful and amiable manner, says an old anonymous chronicle. Pico waylaid her litter as she was going to a villa of her father's, and carried her to his castle near Mirandola, where he respectfully pressed his suit; insisting that he had a right to consider her as his wife. But the lady escaped by letting herself into the moat by a rope of sheets, and Giovanfrancesco Pico was discovered stabbed in the chest, by the hand of Madonna Medea da Carpi. He was a handsome youth only eighteen years old.
The Pico having been settled, and the marriage with him declared null by
the Pope, Medea da Carpi was solemnly married to the Duke of
Stimig-
liano, and went to live upon his domains near Rome.
Two years later, Pierluigi Orsini was stabbed by one of his grooms at
his castle of Stimigliano, near Orvieto; and suspicion fell upon his widow,
more especially as, immediately after the event, she caused the murderer to
be cut down by two servants in her own chamber; but not before he had
declared that she had induced him to assassinate his master by a promise of
her love. Things became so hot for Medea da Carpi that she fled to Urbania
and threw herself at the feet of Duke Guidalfonso II., declaring that she
had caused the groom to be killed merely to avenge her good fame, which he
had slandered, and that she was absolutely guiltless of the death of her
husband. The marvellous beauty of the widowed Duchess of Stimigliano, who
was only nineteen, entirely turned the head of the Duke of Urbania. He
affected implicit belief in her innocence, refused to give her up to the
Orsinis, kinsmen of her late husband, and assigned to her magnificent
apartments in the left wing of the palace, among which the room containing
the famous fireplace ornamented with marble Cupids on a blue ground.
Guidalfonso fell madly in love with his beautiful guest. Hitherto timid and
domestic in character, he began publicly to neglect his wife, Maddalena
Varano of Camerino, with whom, although childless, he had hitherto lived on
excellent terms; he not only treated with
con-
tempt the admonitions of his advisers and of his suzerain the Pope, but went so far as to take measures to repudiate his wife, on the score of quite imaginary ill-conduct. The Duchess Maddalena, unable to bear this treatment, fled to the convent of the barefooted sisters at Pesaro, where she pined away, while Medea da Carpi reigned in her place at Urbania, embroiling Duke Guidalfonso in quarrels both with the powerful Orsinis, who continued to accuse her of Stimigliano's murder, and with the Varanos, kinsmen of the injured Duchess Maddalena; until at length, in the year 1576, the Duke of Urbania, having become suddenly, and not without suspicious circumstances, a widower, publicly married Medea da Carpi two days after the decease of his unhappy wife. No child was born of this marriage; but such was the infatuation of Duke Guidalfonso, that the new Duchess induced him to settle the inheritance of the Duchy (having, with great difficulty, obtained the consent of the Pope) on the boy Bartolommeo, her son by Stimigliano, but whom the Orsinis refused to acknowledge as such, declaring him to be the child of that Giovanfrancesco Pico to whom Medea had been married by proxy, and whom, in defence, as she had said, of her honour, she had assassinated; and this investiture of the Duchy of Urbania on to a stranger and a bastard was at the expense of the obvious rights of the Cardinal Robert, Guidalfonso's younger brother.
In May 1579 Duke Guidalfonso died suddenly and mysteriously, Medea
having forbidden all access to his chamber, lest, on his deathbed, he might
repent and reinstate his brother in his rights. The Duchess immediately
caused her son, Bartolommeo Orsini, to be proclaimed Duke of Urbania, and
herself regent; and, with the help of two or three unscrupulous young men,
particularly a certain Captain Oliverotto da Narni, who was rumoured to be
her lover, seized the reins of government with extraordinary and terrible
vigour, marching an army against the Varanos and Orsinis, who were defeated
at Sigillo, and ruthlessly exterminating every person who dared question
the lawfulness of the succession; while, all the time, Cardinal Robert, who
had flung aside his priest's garb and vows, went about in Rome,
Tuscany, Venice--nay, even to the Emperor and the King of Spain,
imploring help against the usurper. In a few months he had turned the tide
of sympathy against the Duchess-Regent; the Pope solemnly declared the
investiture of Bartolommeo Orsini worthless, and published the accession of
Robert II., Duke of Urbania and Count of Montemurlo; the Grand Duke of
Tuscany and the Venetians secretly promised assistance, but only if Robert
were able to assert his rights by main force. Little by little, one town
after the other of the Duchy went over to Robert, and Medea da Carpi found
herself surrounded in the mountain citadel of Urbania like a
scorpion surrounded by flames. (This simile is not mine, but belongs to Raffaello Gualterio, historiographer to Robert II.) But, unlike the scorpion, Medea refused to commit suicide. It is perfectly marvellous how, without money or allies, she could so long keep her enemies at bay; and Gualterio attributes this to those fatal fascinations which had brought Pico and Stimigliano to their deaths, which had turned the once honest Guidalfonso into a villain, and which were such that, of all her lovers, not one but preferred dying for her, even after he had been treated with ingratitude and ousted by a rival; a faculty which Messer Raffaello Gualterio clearly attributed to hellish connivance.
At last the ex-Cardinal Robert succeeded, and triumphantly entered
Urbania in November 1579. His accession was marked by moderation and
clemency. Not a man was put to death, save Oliverotto da Narni, who threw
himself on the new Duke, tried to stab him as he alighted at the palace,
and who was cut down by the Duke's men, crying, "Orsini, Orsini!
Medea, Medea! Long live Duke Bartolommeo!" with his dying breath,
although it is said that the Duchess had treated him with ignominy. The
little Bartolommeo was sent to Rome to the Orsinis; the Duchess,
respectfully confined in the left wing of the palace.
It is said that she haughtily requested to see the new Duke, but that he
shook his head, and, in his priest's fashion, quoted a verse about
Ulysses and
the Sirens; and it is remarkable that he persistently refused to see her, abruptly leaving his chamber one day that she had entered it by stealth. After a few months a conspiracy was discovered to murder Duke Robert, which had obviously been set on foot by Medea. But the young man, one Marcantonio Frangipani of Rome, denied, even under the severest torture, any complicity of hers; so that Duke Robert, who wished to do nothing violent, merely transferred the Duchess from his villa at Sant' Elmo to the convent of the Clarisse in town, where she was guarded and watched in the closest manner. It seemed impossible that Medea should intrigue any further, for she certainly saw and could be seen by no one. Yet she contrived to send a letter and her portrait to one Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi, a youth, only nineteen years old, of noble Romagnole family, and who was betrothed to one of the most beautiful girls of Urbania. He immediately broke off his engagement, and, shortly afterwards, attempted to shoot Duke Robert with a holster-pistol as he knelt at mass on the festival of Easter Day. This time Duke Robert was determined to obtain proofs against Medea. Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi was kept some days without food, then submitted to the most violent tortures, and finally condemned. When he was going to be flayed with red-hot pincers and quartered by horses, he was told that he might obtain the grace of immediate death by
confessing the complicity of the Duchess; and the confessor and nuns of the convent, which stood in the place of execution outside Porta San Romano, pressed Medea to save the wretch, whose screams reached her, by confessing her own guilt. Medea asked permission to go to a balcony, where she could see Prinzivalle and be seen by him. She looked on coldly, then threw down her embroidered kerchief to the poor mangled creature. He asked the executioner to wipe his mouth with it, kissed it, and cried out that Medea was innocent. Then, after several hours of torments, he died. This was too much for the patience even of Duke Robert. Seeing that as long as Medea lived his life would be in perpetual danger, but unwilling to cause a scandal (somewhat of the priest-nature remaining), he had Medea strangled in the convent, and, what is remarkable, insisted that only women--two infanticides to whom he remitted their sentence--should be employed for the deed.
"This clement prince," writes Don Arcangelo Zappi in his
life of him, published in 1725, "can be blamed only for one act of
cruelty, the more odious as he had himself, until released from his vows by
the Pope, been in holy orders. It is said that when he caused the death of
the infamous Medea da Carpi, his fear lest her extraordinary charms should
seduce any man was such, that he not only employed women as executioners,
but refused to permit her a priest or monk, thus forcing
her to die unshriven, and refusing her the benefit of any penitence that may have lurked in her adamantine heart."
Such is the story of Medea da Carpi, Duchess of Stimigliano Orsini, and
then wife of Duke Guidalfonso II. of Urbania. She was put to death just two
hundred and ninety-seven years ago, December 1582, at the age of barely
seven-and twenty, and having, in the course of her short life, brought to a
violent end five of her lovers, from Giovanfrancesco Pico to Prinzivalle
degli Ordelaffi.
Sept. 20th.--A grand illumination of the town in honour of the
taking of Rome fifteen years ago. Except Sor Asdrubale, my landlord, who
shakes his head at the Piedmontese, as he calls them, the people here are
all Italianissimi. The Popes kept them very much down since Urbania lapsed
to the Holy See in 1645.
Sept. 28th.--I have for some time been hunting for portraits of the
Duchess Medea. Most of them, I imagine, must have been destroyed, perhaps
by Duke Robert II.'s fear lest even after her death this terrible
beauty should play him a trick. Three or four I have, however, been able to
find--one a miniature in the Archives, said to be that which she sent
to poor Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi in order to turn his head; one a marble
bust in the palace lumber-room; one in a large composition, possibly by
Baroccio, representing Cleopatra at the feet of Augustus. Augustus is the
idealised portrait of
Robert II., round cropped head, nose a little awry, clipped beard and scar as usual, but in Roman dress. Cleopatra seems to me, for all her Oriental dress, and although she wears a black wig, to be meant for Medea da Carpi; she is kneeling, baring her breast for the victor to strike, but in reality to captivate him, and he turns away with an awkward gesture of loathing. None of these portraits seem very good, save the miniature, but that is an exquisite work, and with it, and the suggestions of the bust, it is easy to reconstruct the beauty of this terrible being. The type is that most admired by the late Renaissance, and, in some measure, immortalised by Jean Goujon and the French. The face is a perfect oval, the forehead somewhat over-round, with minute curls, like a fleece, of bright auburn hair; the nose a trifle over-aquiline, and the cheek-bones a trifle too low; the eyes grey, large, prominent, beneath exquisitely curved brows and lids just a little too tight at the corners; the mouth also, brilliantly red and most delicately designed, is a little too tight, the lips strained a trifle over the teeth. Tight eyelids and tight lips give a strange refinement, and, at the same time, an air of mystery, a somewhat sinister seductiveness; they seem to take, but not to give. The mouth with a kind of childish pout, looks as if it could bite or suck like a leech. The complexion is dazzlingly fair, the perfect transparent roset lily of a red-haired beauty; the head, with hair elabo-
rately curled and plaited close to it, and adorned with pearls, sits like that of the antique Arethusa on a long, supple, swan-like neck. A curious, at first rather conventional, artificial-looking sort of beauty, voluptuous yet cold, which, the more it is contemplated, the more it troubles and haunts the mind. Round the lady's neck is a gold chain with little gold lozenges at intervals, on which is engraved the posy or pun (the fashion of French devices is common in those days), "Amour Dure--Dure Amour." The same posy is inscribed in the hollow of the bust, and, thanks to it, I have been able to identify the latter as Medea's portrait. I often examine these tragic portraits, wondering what this face, which led so many men to their death, may have been like when it spoke or smiled, what at the moment when Medea da Carpi fascinated her victims into love unto death--"Amour Dure--Dure Amour," as runs her device--love that lasts, cruel love--yes indeed, when one thinks of the fidelity and fate of her lovers.
Oct. 13th.--I have literally not had time to write a line of my
diary all these days. My whole mornings have gone in those Archives, my
afternoons taking long walks in this lovely autumn weather (the highest
hills are just tipped with snow). My evenings go in writing that confounded
account of the Palace of Urbania which Government requires, merely to keep
me at work at something useless. Of my history I have not yet been
able to write a word.... By the way, I must note down a curious circumstance mentioned in an anonymous MS. life of Duke Robert, which I fell upon to-day. When this prince had the equestrian statue of himself by Antonio Tassi, Gianbologna's pupil, erected in the square of the Corte, he secretly caused to be made, says my anonymous MS., a silver statuette of his familiar genius or angel--"familiaris ejus angelus seu genius, quod a vulgo dicitur idolino"--which statuette or idol, after having been consecrated by the astrologers--"ab astrologis quibusdam ritibus sacrato"--was placed in the cavity of the chest of the effigy by Tassi, in order, says the MS., that his soul might rest until the general Resurrection. This passage is curious, and to me somewhat puzzling; how could the soul of Duke Robert await the general Resurrection, when, as a Catholic, he ought to have believed that it must, as soon as separated from his body, go to Purgatory? Or is there some semi-pagan superstition of the Renaissance (most strange, certainly, in a man who had been a Cardinal) connecting the soul with a guardian genius, who could be compelled, by magic rites ("ab astrologis sacrato," the MS. says of the little idol), to remain fixed to earth, so that the soul should sleep in the body until the Day of Judgment? I confess this story baffles me. I wonder whether such an idol ever existed, or exists nowadays, in the body of Tassi's bronze effigy?
Oct. 20th.--I have been seeing a good deal of late of the
Vice-Prefect's son: an amiable young man with a love-sick face and a
languid interest in Urbanian history and archæology, of which he is
profoundly ignorant. This young man, who has lived at Siena and Lucca
before his father was promoted here, wears extremely long and tight
trousers, which almost preclude his bending his knees, a stick-up collar
and an eyeglass, and a pair of fresh kid gloves stuck in the breast of his
coat, speaks of Urbania as Ovid might have spoken of Pontus, and complains
(as well he may) of the barbarism of the young men, the officials who dine
at my inn and howl and sing like madmen, and the nobles who drive gigs,
showing almost as much throat as a lady at a ball. This person frequently
entertains me with his amori, past, present,
and future; he evidently thinks me very odd for having none to entertain
him with in return; he points out to me the pretty (or ugly) servant-girls
and dressmakers as we walk in the street, sighs deeply or sings in falsetto
behind every tolerably young-looking woman, and has finally taken me to the
house of the lady of his heart, a great black-moustachioed countess, with a
voice like a fish-crier; here, he says, I shall meet all the best company
in Urbania and some beautiful women--ah, too beautiful, alas! I find
three huge half-furnished rooms, with bare brick floors, petroleum lamps,
and horribly bad pictures on bright wash-
ball-blue and gamboge walls, and in the midst of it all, every evening, a dozen ladies and gentlemen seated in a circle, vociferating at each other the same news a year old; the younger ladies in bright yellows and greens, fanning themselves while my teeth chatter, and having sweet things whispered behind their fans by officers with hair brushed up like a hedgehog. And these are the women my friend expects me to fall in love with! I vainly wait for tea or supper which does not come, and rush home, determined to leave alone the Urbanian beau monde.
It is quite true that I have no amori,
although my friend does not believe it. When I came to Italy first, I
looked out for romance; I sighed, like Goethe in Rome, for a window to open
and a wondrous creature to appear, "welch mich versengend
erquickt." Perhaps it is because Goethe was a German, accustomed to
German Fraus, and I am, after all, a Pole,
accustomed to something very different from
Fraus; but anyhow, for all my efforts, in Rome,
Florence, and Siena, I never could find a woman to go mad about, either
among the ladies, chattering bad French, or among the lower classes, as
'cute and cold as money-lenders; so I steer clear of Italian
womankind, its shrill voice and gaudy toilettes. I am wedded to history, to
the Past, to women like Lucrezia Borgia, Vittoria Accoramboni, or that
Medea da Carpi, for the present; some day I shall perhaps find a grand
passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about, like the Pole that I am; a woman out of whose slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but not here! Few things strike me so much as the degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of that extreme distinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, even if only potential, I do believe I could love her, even to the Day of Judgment, like any Oliverotto da Narni, or Frangipani or Prinzivalle.
Oct. 27th.--Fine sentiments the above are for a professor, a
learned man! I thought the young artists of Rome childish because they
played practical jokes and yelled at night in the streets, returning from
the Caffé Greco or the cellar in the Via Palombella; but am I not as
childish to the full--I, melancholy wretch, whom they called Hamlet
and the Knight of the Doleful Countenance?
Nov. 5th.--I can't free myself from the thought of this Medea
da Carpi. In my walks, my mornings in the Archives, my solitary evenings, I
catch myself thinking over the woman. Am I turning novelist instead of
historian? And still it seems to me that I understand her so well; so much
better than my facts warrant. First, we must put aside all pedantic modern
ideas of right and wrong. Right and wrong in a century of violence and
treachery does not exist, least of all for creatures like Medea. Go preach right and wrong to a tigress, my dear sir! Yet is there in the world anything nobler than the huge creature, steel when she springs, velvet when she treads, as she stretches her supple body, or smooths her beautiful skin, or fastens her strong claws into her victim?
Yes; I can understand Medea. Fancy a woman of superlative beauty, of the
highest courage and calmness, a woman of many resources, of genius, brought
up by a petty princelet of a father, upon Tacitus and Sallust, and the
tales of the great Malatestas, of Cæsar Borgia and such-like!--a
woman whose one passion is conquest and empire--fancy her, on the eve
of being wedded to a man of the power of the Duke of Stimigliano, claimed,
carried off by a small fry of a Pico, locked up in his hereditary
brigand's castle, and having to receive the young fool's red-hot
love as an honour and a necessity! The mere thought of any violence to such
a nature is an abominable outrage; and if Pico chooses to embrace such a
woman at the risk of meeting a sharp piece of steel in her arms, why, it is
a fair bargain. Young hound--or, if you prefer, young hero--to
think to treat a woman like this as if she were any village wench! Medea
marries her Orsini. A marriage, let it be noted, between an old soldier of
fifty and a girl of sixteen. Reflect what that means: it means that this
imperious woman is soon treated like a chattel, made
roughly to understand that her business is to give the Duke an heir, not advice; that she must never ask "wherefore this or that?" that she must courtesy before the Duke's counsellors, his captains, his mistresses; that, at the least suspicion of rebelliousness, she is subject to his foul words and blows; at the least suspicion of infidelity, to be strangled or starved to death, or thrown down an oubliette. Suppose that she know that her husband has taken it into his head that she has looked too hard at this man or that, that one of his lieutenants or one of his women have whispered that, after all, the boy Bartolommeo might as soon be a Pico as an Orsini. Suppose she know that she must strike or be struck? Why, she strikes, or gets some one to strike for her. At what price? A promise of love, of love to a groom, the son of a serf! Why, the dog must be mad or drunk to believe such a thing possible; his very belief in anything so monstrous makes him worthy of death. And then he dares to blab! This is much worse than Pico. Medea is bound to defend her honour a second time; if she could stab Pico, she can certainly stab this fellow, or have him stabbed.
Hounded by her husband's kinsmen, she takes refuge at Urbania. The
Duke, like every other man, falls wildly in love with Medea, and neglects
his wife; let us even go so far as to say, breaks his wife's heart. Is
this Medea's fault? Is it her fault that every stone that comes
beneath her
chariot-wheels is crushed? Certainly not. Do you suppose that a woman like Medea feels the smallest ill-will against a poor, craven Duchess Maddalena? Why, she ignores her very existence. To suppose Medea a cruel woman is as grotesque as to call her an immoral woman. Her fate is, sooner or later, to triumph over her enemies, at all events to make their victory almost a defeat; her magic faculty is to enslave all the men who come across her path; all those who see her, love her, become her slaves; and it is the destiny of all her slaves to perish. Her lovers, with the exception of Duke Guidalfonso, all come to an untimely end; and in this there is nothing unjust. The possession of a woman like Medea is a happiness too great for a mortal man; it would turn his head, make him forget even what he owed her; no man must survive long who conceives himself to have a right over her; it is a kind of sacrilege. And only death, the willingness to pay for such happiness by death, can at all make a man worthy of being her lover; he must be willing to love and suffer and die. This is the meaning of her device--"Amour Dure--Dure Amour." The love of Medea da Carpi cannot fade, but the lover can die; it is a constant and a cruel love.
Nov. 11th.--I was right, quite right in my idea. I have
found--Oh, joy! I treated the Vice-Prefect's son to a dinner of
five courses at the Trattoria La Stella d'Italia out of sheer
jubilation--I have
found in the Archives, unknown, of course, to the Director, a heap of letters--letters of Duke Robert about Medea da Carpi, letters of Medea herself! Yes, Medea's own handwriting--a round, scholarly character, full of abbreviations, with a Greek look about it, as befits a learned princess who could read Plato as well as Petrarch. The letters are of little importance, mere drafts of business letters for her secretary to copy, during the time that she governed the poor weak Guidalfonso. But they are her letters, and I can imagine almost that there hangs about these mouldering pieces of paper a scent as of a woman's hair.
The few letters of Duke Robert show him in a new light. A cunning, cold,
but craven priest. He trembles at the bare thought of Medea--"la
pessima Medea"--worse than her namesake of Colchis, as he calls
her. His long clemency is a result of mere fear of laying violent hands
upon her. He fears her as something almost supernatural; he would have
enjoyed having had her burnt as a witch. After letter on letter, telling
his crony, Cardinal Sanseverino, at Rome his various precautions during her
lifetime--how he wears a jacket of mail under his coat; how he drinks
only milk from a cow which he has milked in his presence; how he tries his
dog with morsels of his food, lest it be poisoned; how he suspects the
wax-candles because of their peculiar smell; how he fears riding out lest
some one should frighten his horse and cause him to
break his neck--after all this, and when Medea has been in her grave two years, he tells his correspondent of his fear of meeting the soul of Medea after his own death, and chuckles over the ingenious device (concocted by his astrologer and a certain Fra Gaudenzio, a Capuchin) by which he shall secure the absolute peace of his soul until that of the wicked Medea be finally "chained up in hell among the lakes of boiling pitch and the ice of Caina described by the immortal bard"--old pedant! Here, then, is the explanation of that silver image--quod vulgo dicitur idolino--which he caused to be soldered into his effigy by Tassi. As long as the image of his soul was attached to the image of his body, he should sleep awaiting the Day of Judgment, fully convinced that Medea's soul will then be properly tarred and feathered, while his--honest man!--will fly straight to Paradise. And to think that, two weeks ago, I believed this man to be a hero! Aha! my good Duke Robert, you shall be shown up in my history; and no amount of silver idolinos shall save you from being heartily laughed at!
Nov. 15th.--Strange! That idiot of a Prefect's son, who has
heard me talk a hundred times of Medea da Carpi, suddenly recollects that,
when he was a child at Urbania, his nurse used to threaten him with a visit
from Madonna Medea, who rode in the sky on a black he-goat. My Duchess
Medea turned into a bogey for naughty little boys!
Nov. 20th.--I have been going about with a Bavarian Professor of
mediæval history, showing him all over the country. Among other
places we went to Rocca Sant' Elmo, to see the former villa of the
Dukes of Urbania, the villa where Medea was confined between the accession
of Duke Robert and the conspiracy of Marcantonio Frangipani, which caused
her removal to the nunnery immediately outside the town. A long ride up the
desolate Apennine valleys, bleak beyond words just now with their thin
fringe of oak scrub turned russet, thin patches of grass sered by the
frost, the last few yellow leaves of the poplars by the torrents shaking
and fluttering about in the chill Tramontana; the mountain-tops are wrapped
in thick grey cloud; to-morrow, if the wind continues, we shall see them
round masses of snow against the cold blue sky. Sant' Elmo is a
wretched hamlet high on the Apennine ridge, where the Italian vegetation is
already replaced by that of the North. You ride for miles through leafless
chestnut woods, the scent of the soaking brown leaves filling the air, the
roar of the torrent, turbid with autumn rains, rising from the precipice
below; then suddenly the leafless chestnut woods are replaced, as at
Vallombrosa, by a belt of black, dense fir plantations. Emerging from
these, you come to an open space, frozen blasted meadows, the rocks of snow
clad peak, the newly fallen snow, close above you; and in the midst, on a
knoll, with a
gnarled larch on either side, the ducal villa of Sant' Elmo, a big black stone box with a stone escutcheon, grated windows, and a double flight of steps in front. It is now let out to the proprietor of the neighbouring woods, who uses it for the storage of chestnuts, faggots, and charcoal from the neighbouring ovens. We tied our horses to the iron rings and entered: an old woman, with dishevelled hair, was alone in the house. The villa is a mere hunting-lodge, built by Ottobuono IV., the father of Dukes Guidalfonso and Robert, about 1530. Some of the rooms have at one time been frescoed and panelled with oak carvings, but all this has disappeared. Only, in one of the big rooms, there remains a large marble fireplace, similar to those in the palace at Urbania, beautifully carved with Cupids on a blue ground; a charming naked boy sustains a jar on either side, one containing clove pinks, the other roses. The room was filled with stacks of faggots.
We returned home late, my companion in excessively bad humour at the
fruitlessness of the expedition. We were caught in the skirt of a snowstorm
as we got into the chestnut woods. The sight of the snow falling gently, of
the earth and bushes whitened all round, made me feel back at Posen, once
more a child. I sang and shouted, to my companion's horror. This will
be a bad point against me if reported at Berlin. A historian of twenty-four
who shouts and sings, and that
when another historian is cursing at the snow and the bad roads! All night I lay awake watching the embers of my wood fire, and thinking of Medea da Carpi mewed up, in winter, in that solitude of Sant' Elmo, the firs groaning, the torrent roaring, the snow falling all round; miles and miles away from human creatures. I fancied I saw it all, and that I, somehow, was Marcantonio Frangipani come to liberate her--or was it Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi? I suppose it was because of the long ride, the unaccustomed pricking feeling of the snow in the air; or perhaps the punch which my professor insisted on drinking after dinner.
Nov. 23rd.--Thank goodness, that Bavarian professor has finally
departed! Those days he spent here drove me nearly crazy. Talking over my
work, I told him one day my views on Medea da Carpi; whereupon he
condescended to answer that those were the usual tales due to the
mythopoeic (old idiot!) tendency of the Renaissance; that research
would disprove the greater part of them, as it had disproved the stories
current about the Borgias, &c.; that, moreover, such a woman as I made
out was psychologically and physiologically impossible. Would that one
could say as much of such professors as he and his fellows!
Nov. 24tlh.--I cannot get over my pleasure in being rid of that
imbecile; I felt as if I could have throttled him every time he spoke of
the Lady of
my thoughts--for such she has become--Metea, as the animal called her!
Nov. 30th.--I feel quite shaken at what has just happened; I am
beginning to fear that that old pedant was right in saying that it was bad
for me to live all alone in a strange country, that it would make me
morbid. It is ridiculous that I should be put into such a state of
excitement merely by the chance discovery of a portrait of a woman dead
these three hundred years. With the case of my uncle Ladislas, and other
suspicions of insanity in my family, I ought really to guard against such
foolish excitement.
Yet the incident was really dramatic, uncanny. I could have sworn that I
knew every picture in the palace here; and particularly every picture of
Her. Anyhow, this morning, as I was leaving the Archives, I passed through
one of the many small rooms--irregular-shaped closets--which fill
up the ins and outs of this curious palace, turreted like a French
château. I must have passed through that closet before, for the view
was so familiar out of its window; just the particular bit of round tower
in front, the cypress on the other side of the ravine, the belfry beyond,
and the piece of the line of Monte Sant' Agata and the Leonessa,
covered with snow, against the sky. I suppose there must be twin rooms, and
that I had got into the wrong one; or rather, perhaps some shutter had been
opened or curtain withdrawn. As I was passing, my eye was
caught by a very beautiful old mirror-frame let into the brown and yellow inlaid wall. I approached, and looking at the frame, looked also, mechanically, into the glass. I gave a great start, and almost shrieked, I do believe--(it's lucky the Munich professor is safe out of Urbania!). Behind my own image stood another, a figure close to my shoulder, a face close to mine; and that figure, that face, hers! Medea da Carpi's! I turned sharp round, as white, I think, as the ghost I expected to see. On the wall opposite the mirror, just a pace or two behind where I had been standing, hung a portrait. And such a portrait!--Bronzino never painted a grander one. Against a background of harsh, dark blue, there stands out the figure of the Duchess (for it is Medea, the real Medea, a thousand times more real, individual, and powerful than in the other portraits), seated stiffly in a high-backed chair, sustained, as it were, almost rigid, by the stiff brocade of skirts and stomacher, stiffer for plaques of embroidered silver flowers and rows of seed pearl. The dress is, with its mixture of silver and pearl, of a strange dull red, a wicked poppy-juice colour, against which the flesh of the long, narrow hands with fringe-like fingers; of the long slender neck, and the face with bared forehead, looks white and hard, like alabaster. The face is the same as in the other portraits: the same rounded forehead, with the short fleece-like, yellowish-red curls; the same
beautifully curved eyebrows, just barely marked; the same eyelids, a little tight across the eyes; the same lips, a little tight across the mouth; but with a purity of line, a dazzling splendour of skin, and intensity of look immeasurably superior to all the other portraits.
She looks out of the frame with a cold, level glance; yet the lips
smile. One hand holds a dull-red rose; the other, long, narrow, tapering,
plays with a thick rope of silk and gold and jewels hanging from the waist;
round the throat, white as marble, partially confined in the tight dull-red
bodice, hangs a gold collar, with the device on alternate enamelled
medallions, "AMOUR DURE--DURE AMOUR."
On reflection, I see that I simply could never have been in that room or
closet before; I must have mistaken the door. But, although the explanation
is so simple, I still, after several hours, feel terribly shaken in all my
being. If I grow so excitable I shall have to go to Rome at Christmas for a
holiday. I feel as if some danger pursued me here (can it be fever?); and
yet, and yet, I don't see how I shall ever tear myself away.
Dec. 10th.--I have made an effort, and accepted the
Vice-Prefect's son's invitation to see the oil-making at a villa
of theirs near the coast. The villa, or farm, is an old fortified, towered
place, standing on a hillside among olive-trees and little osier-bushes,
which look like a bright orange
flame. The olives are squeezed in a tremendous black cellar, like a prison: you see, by the faint white daylight, and the smoky yellow flare of resin burning in pans, great white bullocks moving round a huge millstone; vague figures working at pulleys and handles: it looks, to my fancy, like some scene of the Inquisition. The Cavaliere regaled me with his best wine and rusks. I took some long walks by the seaside; I had left Urbania wrapped in snow-clouds; down on the coast there was a bright sun; the sunshine, the sea, the bustle of the little port on the Adriatic seemed to do me good. I came back to Urbania another man. Sor Asdrubale, my landlord, poking about in slippers among the gilded chests, the Empire sofas, the old cups and saucers and pictures which no one will buy, congratulated me upon the improvement in my looks. "You work too much," he says; "youth requires amusement, theatres, promenades, amori--it is time enough to be serious when one is bald"--and he took off his greasy red cap. Yes, I am better! and, as a result, I take to my work with delight again. I will cut them out still, those wiseacres at Berlin!
Dec. 14th.--I don't think I have ever felt so happy about my
work. I see it all so well--that crafty, cowardly Duke Robert; that
melancholy Duchess Maddalena; that weak, showy, would-be chivalrous Duke
Guidalfonso; and above all, the splendid figure of Medea. I feel as if I
were the
greatest historian of the age; and, at the same time, as if I were a boy of twelve. It snowed yesterday for the first time in the city, for two good hours. When it had done, I actually went into the square and taught the ragamuffins to make a snow-man; no, a snow-woman; and I had the fancy to call her Medea. "La pessima Medea!" cried one of the boys--"the one who used to ride through the air on a goat?" "No, no," I said; "she was a beautiful lady, the Duchess of Urbania, the most beautiful woman that ever lived." I made her a crown of tinsel, and taught the boys to cry "Evviva, Medea!" But one of them said, "She is a witch! She must be burnt!" At which they all rushed to fetch burning faggots and tow; in a minute the yelling demons had melted her down.
Dec. 15th.--What a goose I am, and to think I am twenty-four, and
known in literature! In my long walks I have composed to a tune (I
don't know what it is) which all the people are singing and whistling
in the street at present, a poem in frightful Italian, beginning
"Medea, mia dea," calling on her in the name of her various
lovers. I go about humming between my teeth, "Why am I not
Marcantonio? or Prinzivalle? or he of Narni? or the good Duke Alfonso? that
I might be beloved by thee, Medea, mia dea," &c. &c. Awful
rubbish! My landlord, I think, suspects that Medea must be some lady I met
while I was
staying by the seaside. I am sure Sora Serafina, Sora Lodovica, and Sora Adalgisa--the three Parcæ or Norns, as I call them--have some such notion. This afternoon, at dusk, while tidying my room, Sora Lodovica said to me, "How beautifully the Signorino has taken to singing!" I was scarcely aware that I had been vociferating, "Vieni, Medea, mia dea," while the old lady bobbed about making up my fire. I stopped; a nice reputation I shall get! I thought, and all this will somehow get to Rome, and thence to Berlin. Sora Lodovica was leaning out of the window, pulling in the iron hook of the shrine-lamp which marks Sor Asdrubale's house. As she was trimming the lamp previous to swinging it out again, she said in her odd, prudish little way, "You are wrong to stop singing, my son" (she varies between calling me Signor Professore and such terms of affection as "Nino," "Viscere mie," &c.); "you are wrong to stop singing, for there is a young lady there in the street who has actually stopped to listen to you."
I ran to the window. A woman, wrapped in a black shawl, was standing in
an archway, looking up to the window.
"Eh, eh! the Signor Professore has admirers," said Sora
Lodovica.
"Medea, mia dea!" I burst out as loud as I could, with a
boy's pleasure in disconcerting the inquisitive passer-by. She turned
suddenly round
to go away, waving her hand at me; at that moment Sora Lodovica swung the shrine-lamp back into its place. A stream of light fell across the street. I felt myself grow quite cold; the face of the woman outside was that of Medea da Carpi!
What a fool I am, to be sure!
"To SPIRIDION.--A person who knows the interest you bear
her will be at the Church of
San Giovanni Decollato this evening at nine. Look out, in the left aisle, for a lady wearing a black mantle, and holding a rose."
By this time I understood that I was the object of a conspiracy, the
victim of a hoax. I turned the letter round and round. It was written on
paper such as was made in the sixteenth century, and in an extraordinarily
precise imitation of Medea da Carpi's characters. Who had written it?
I thought over all the possible people. On the whole, it must be the
Vice-Prefect's son, perhaps in combination with his lady-love, the
Countess. They must have torn a blank page off some old letter; but that
either of them should have had the ingenuity of inventing such a hoax, or
the power of committing such a forgery, astounds me beyond measure. There
is more in these people than I should have guessed. How pay them off? By
taking no notice of the letter? Dignified, but dull. No, I will go; perhaps
some one will be there, and I will mystify them in their turn. Or, if no
one is there, how I shall crow over them for their imperfectly carried out
plot! Perhaps this is some folly of the Cavalier Muzio's to bring me
into the presence of some lady whom he destines to be the flame of my
future amori. That is likely enough. And it
would be too idiotic and professorial to refuse such an invitation; the
lady must be worth knowing who can forge sixteenth-century letters
like this, for I am sure that languid swell Muzio never could. I will go! By Heaven! I'll pay them back in their own coin! It is now five--how long these days are!
Dec. 18th.--Am I mad? Or are there really ghosts? That adventure of
last night has shaken me to the very depth of my soul.
I went at nine, as the mysterious letter had bid me. It was bitterly
cold, and the air full of fog and sleet; not a shop open, not a window
unshuttered, not a creature visible; the narrow black streets, precipitous
between their high walls and under their lofty archways, were only the
blacker for the dull light of an oil-lamp here and there, with its
flickering yellow reflection on the wet flags. San Giovanni Decollato is a
little church, or rather oratory, which I have always hitherto seen shut up
(as so many churches here are shut up except on great festivals); and
situate behind the ducal palace, on a sharp ascent, and forming the
bifurcation of two steep paved lanes. I have passed by the place a hundred
times, and scarcely noticed the little church, except for the marble high
relief over the door, showing the grizzly head of the Baptist in the
charger, and for the iron cage close by, in which were formerly exposed the
heads of criminals; the decapitated, or, as they call him here, decollated,
John the Baptist, being apparently the patron of axe and block.
A few strides took me from my lodgings to San
Giovanni Decollato. I confess I was excited; one is not twenty-four and a Pole for nothing. On getting to the kind of little platform at the bifurcation of the two precipitous streets, I found, to my surprise, that the windows of the church or oratory were not lighted, and that the door was locked! So this was the precious joke that had been played upon me; to send me on a bitter cold, sleety night, to a church which was shut up and had perhaps been shut up for years! I don't know what I couldn't have done in that moment of rage; I felt inclined to break open the church door, or to go and pull the Vice-Prefect's son out of bed (for I felt sure that the joke was his). I determined upon the latter course; and was walking towards his door, along the black alley to the left of the church, when I was suddenly stopped by the sound as of an organ close by; an organ, yes, quite plainly, and the voice of choristers and the drone of a litany. So the church was not shut, after all! I retraced my steps to the top of the lane. All was dark and in complete silence. Suddenly there came again a faint gust of organ and voices. I listened; it clearly came from the other lane, the one on the right-hand side. Was there, perhaps, another door there? I passed beneath the archway, and descended a little way in the direction whence the sounds seemed to come. But no door, no light, only the black walls, the black wet flags, with their faint yellow reflec-
tions of flickering oil-lamps; moreover, complete silence. I stopped a minute, and then the chant rose again; this time it seemed to me most certainly from the lane I had just left. I went back--nothing. Thus backwards and forwards, the sounds always beckoning, as it were, one way, only to beckon me back, vainly, to the other.
At last I lost patience; and I felt a sort of creeping terror, which
only a violent action could dispel. If the mysterious sounds came neither
from the street to the right, nor from the street to the left, they could
come only from the church. Half-maddened, I rushed up the two or three
steps, and prepared to wrench the door open with a tremendous effort. To my
amazement, it opened with the greatest ease. I entered, and the sounds of
the litany met me louder than before, as I paused a moment between the
outer door and the heavy leathern curtain. I raised the latter and crept
in. The altar was brilliantly illuminated with tapers and garlands of
chandeliers; this was evidently some evening service connected with
Christmas. The nave and aisles were comparatively dark, and about
half-full. I elbowed my way along the right aisle towards the altar. When
my eyes had got accustomed to the unexpected light, I began to look round
me, and with a beating heart. The idea that all this was a hoax, that I
should meet merely some acquaintance of my friend the Cavaliere's, had
somehow departed: I
looked about. The people were all wrapped up, the men in big cloaks, the women in woollen veils and mantles. The body of the church was comparatively dark, and I could not make out anything very clearly, but it seemed to me, somehow, as if, under the cloaks and veils, these people were dressed in a rather extraordinary fashion. The man in front of me, I remarked, showed yellow stockings beneath his cloak; a woman, hard by, a red bodice, laced behind with gold tags. Could these be peasants from some remote part come for the Christmas festivities, or did the inhabitants of Urbania don some old-fashioned garb in honour of Christmas?
As I was wondering, my eye suddenly caught that of a woman standing in
the opposite aisle, close to the altar, and in the full blaze of its
lights. She was wrapped in black, but held, in a very conspicuous way, a
red rose, an unknown luxury at this time of the year in a place like
Urbania. She evidently saw me, and turning even more fully into the light,
she loosened her heavy black cloak, displaying a dress of deep red, with
gleams of silver and gold embroideries; she turned her face towards me; the
full blaze of the chandeliers and tapers fell upon it. It was the face of
Medea da Carpi! I dashed across the nave, pushing people roughly aside, or
rather, it seemed to me, passing through impalpable bodies. But the lady
turned and walked rapidly down the aisle
towards the door. I followed close upon her, but somehow I could not get up with her. Once, at the curtain, she turned round again. She was within a few paces of me. Yes, it was Medea. Medea herself, no mistake, no delusion, no sham; the oval face, the lips tightened over the mouth, the eyelids tight over the corner of the eyes, the exquisite alabaster complexion! She raised the curtain and glided out. I followed; the curtain alone separated me from her. I saw the wooden door swing to behind her. One step ahead of me! I tore open the door; she must be on the steps, within reach of my arm!
I stood outside the church. All was empty, merely the wet pavement and
the yellow reflections in the pools: a sudden cold seized me; I could not
go on. I tried to re-enter the church; it was shut. I rushed home, my hair
standing on end, and trembling in all my limbs, and remained for an hour
like a maniac. Is it a delusion? Am I too going mad? O God, God! am I going
mad?
Dec. 19th.--A brilliant, sunny day; all the black snow-slush has
disappeared out of the town, off the bushes and trees. The snow-clad
mountains sparkle against the bright blue sky. A Sunday, and Sunday
weather; all the bells are ringing for the approach of Christmas. They are
preparing for a kind of fair in the square with the colonnade, putting up
booths filled with coloured cotton and woollen ware, bright shawls and
kerchiefs, mirrors,
ribbons, brilliant pewter lamps; the whole turn-out of the pedlar in "Winter's Tale." The pork-shops are all garlanded with green and with paper flowers, the hams and cheeses stuck full of little flags and green twigs. I strolled out to see the cattle-fair outside the gate; a forest of interlacing horns, an ocean of lowing and stamping: hundreds of immense white bullocks, with horns a yard long and red tassels, packed close together on the little piazza d'armi under the city walls. Bah! why do I write this trash? What's the use of it all? While I am forcing myself to write about bells, and Christmas festivities, and cattle-fairs, one idea goes on like a bell within me: Medea, Medea! Have I really seen her, or am I mad?
Two hours later.--That Church of San Giovanni Decollato--so my
landlord informs me--has not been made use of within the memory of
man. Could it have been all a hallucination or a dream--perhaps a
dream dreamed that night? I have been out again to look at that church.
There it is, at the bifurcation of the two steep lanes, with its bas-relief
of the Baptist's head over the door. The door does look as if it had
not been opened for years. I can see the cobwebs in the window-panes; it
does look as if, as Sor Asdrubale says, only rats and spiders congregated
within it. And yet--and yet; I have so clear a remembrance, so
distinct a consciousness of it all. There was a picture of the daughter of
Herodias dancing, upon
the altar; I remember her white turban with a scarlet tuft of feathers, and Herod's blue caftan; I remember the shape of the central chandelier; it swung round slowly, and one of the wax lights had got bent almost in two by the heat and draught.
Things, all these, which I may have seen elsewhere, stored unawares in
my brain, and which may have come out, somehow, in a dream; I have heard
physiologists allude to such things. I will go again: if the church be
shut, why then it must have been a dream, a vision, the result of
over-excitement. I must leave at once for Rome and see doctors, for I am
afraid of going mad. If, on the other hand--pshaw! there is no
other hand in such a case. Yet if there were--why then, I
should really have seen Medea; I might see her again; speak to her. The
mere thought sets my blood in a whirl, not with horror, but with . . . I
know not what to call it. The feeling terrifies me, but it is delicious.
Idiot! There is some little coil of my brain, the twentieth of a
hair's-breadth out of order--that's all!
Dec. 20th.--I have been again; I have heard the music; I have been
inside the church; I have seen Her! I can no longer doubt my senses. Why
should I? Those pedants say that the dead are dead, the past is past. For
them, yes; but why for me?--why for a man who loves, who is consumed
with the love of a woman?--a woman who, indeed--yes, let me
finish the sentence. Why
should there not be ghosts to such as can see them? Why should she not return to the earth, if she knows that it contains a man who thinks of, desires, only her?
A hallucination? Why, I saw her, as I see this paper that I write upon;
standing there, in the full blaze of the altar. Why, I heard the rustle of
her skirts, I smelt the scent of her hair, I raised the curtain which was
shaking from her touch. Again I missed her. But this time, as I rushed out
into the empty moonlit street, I found upon the church steps a
rose--the rose which I had seen in her hand the moment before--I
felt it, smelt it; a rose, a real, living rose, dark red and only just
plucked. I put it into water when I returned, after having kissed it, who
knows how many times? I placed it on the top of the cupboard; I determined
not to look at it for twenty-four hours lest it should be a delusion. But I
must see it again; I must.... Good Heavens! this is horrible, horrible; if
I had found a skeleton it could not have been worse! The rose, which last
night seemed freshly plucked, full of colour and perfume, is brown,
dry--a thing kept for centuries between the leaves of a book--it
has crumbled into dust between my fingers. Horrible, horrible! But why so,
pray? Did I not know that I was in love with a woman dead three hundred
years? If I wanted fresh roses which bloomed yesterday, the Countess
Fiammetta or
any little sempstress in Urbania might have given them me. What if the rose has fallen to dust? If only I could hold Medea in my arms as I held it in my fingers, kiss her lips as I kissed its petals, should I not be satisfied if she too were to fall to dust the next moment, if I were to fall to dust myself?
Dec. 22nd, Eleven at night.--I have seen her once
more!--almost spoken to her. I have been promised her love! Ah,
Spiridion! you were right when you felt that you were not made for any
earthly
amori. At the usual hour I betook myself this
evening to San Giovanni Decollato. A bright winter night; the high houses
and belfries standing out against a deep blue heaven luminous, shimmering
like steel with myriads of stars; the moon has not yet risen. There was no
light in the windows; but, after a little effort, the door opened and I
entered the church, the altar, as usual, brilliantly illuminated. It struck
me suddenly that all this crowd of men and women standing all round, these
priests chanting and moving about the altar, were dead--that they did
not exist for any man save me. I touched, as if by accident, the hand of my
neighbour; it was cold, like wet clay. He turned round, but did not seem to
see me: his face was ashy, and his eyes staring, fixed, like those of a
blind man or a corpse. I felt as if I must rush out. But at that moment my
eye fell upon Her, standing as usual by the altar steps, wrapped in a
black mantle, in the full blaze of the lights. She turned round; the light fell straight upon her face, the face with the delicate features, the eyelids and lips a little tight, the alabaster skin faintly tinged with pale pink. Our eyes met.
I pushed my way across the nave towards where she stood by the altar
steps; she turned quickly down the aisle, and I after her. Once or twice
she lingered, and I thought I should overtake her; but again, when, not a
second after the door had closed upon her, I stepped out into the street,
she had vanished. On the church step lay something white. It was not a
flower this time, but a letter. I rushed back to the church to read it; but
the church was fast shut, as if it had not been opened for years. I could
not see by the flickering shrine-lamps--I rushed home, lit my lamp,
pulled the letter from my breast. I have it before me. The handwriting is
hers; the same as in the Archives, the same as in that first
letter:--
"To SPIRIDION.--Let thy courage be equal to thy love, and
thy love shall be rewarded. On the night preceding Christmas, take a
hatchet and saw; cut boldly into the body of the bronze rider who stands in
the Corte, on the left side, near the waist. Saw open the body, and within
it thou wilt find the silver effigy of a winged genius. Take it out, hack
it into a hundred pieces, and fling them in all directions, so that the
winds may sweep them away.
That night she whom thou lovest will come to reward thy fidelity."
On the brownish wax is the device--
"AMOUR DURE--DURE AMOUR."
Dec. 23rd.--So it is true! I was reserved for something wonderful
in this world. I have at last found that after which my soul has been
straining. Ambition, love of art, love of Italy, these things which have
occupied my spirit, and have yet left me continually unsatisfied, these
were none of them my real destiny. I have sought for life, thirsting for it
as a man in the desert thirsts for a well; but the life of the senses of
other youths, the life of the intellect of other men, have never slaked
that thirst. Shall life for me mean the love of a dead woman? We smile at
what we choose to call the superstition of the past, forgetting that all
our vaunted science of to-day may seem just such another superstition to
the men of the future; but why should the present be right and the past
wrong? The men who painted the pictures and built the palaces of three
hundred years ago were certainly of as delicate fibre, of as keen reason,
as ourselves, who merely print calico and build locomotives. What makes me
think this, is that I have been calculating my nativity by help of an old
book belonging to Sor Asdrubale--and see, my horoscope tallies almost
exactly with that
of Medea da Carpi, as given by a chronicler. May this explain? No, no; all is explained by the fact that the first time I read of this woman's career, the first time I saw her portrait, I loved her, though I hid my love to myself in the garb of historical interest. Historical interest indeed!
I have got the hatchet and the saw. I bought the saw of a poor joiner,
in a village some miles off; he did not understand at first what I meant,
and I think he thought me mad; perhaps I am. But if madness means the
happiness of one's life, what of it? The hatchet I saw lying in a
timber-yard, where they prepare the great trunks of the fir-trees which
grow high on the Apennines of Sant' Elmo. There was no one in the
yard, and I could not resist the temptation; I handled the thing, tried its
edge, and stole it. This is the first time in my life that I have been a
thief; why did I not go into a shop and buy a hatchet? I don't know; I
seemed unable to resist the sight of the shining blade. What I am going to
do is, I suppose, an act of vandalism; and certainly I have no right to
spoil the property of this city of Urbania. But I wish no harm either to
the statue or the city; if I could plaster up the bronze, I would do so
willingly. But I must obey Her; I must avenge Her; I must get at that
silver image which Robert of Montemurlo had made and consecrated in order
that his cowardly soul might sleep in peace, and not encounter that of the
being
whom he dreaded most in the world. Aha! Duke Robert, you forced her to die unshriven, and you stuck the image of your soul into the image of your body, thinking thereby that, while she suffered the tortures of Hell, you would rest in peace, until your well-scoured little soul might fly straight up to Paradise;--you were afraid of Her when both of you should be dead, and thought yourself very clever to have prepared for all emergencies! Not so, Serene Highness. You too shall taste what it is to wander after death, and to meet the dead whom one has injured.
What an interminable day! But I shall see her again to-night.
Eleven o'clock.--No; the church was fast closed; the spell had
ceased. Until to-morrow I shall not see her. But to-morrow! Ah, Medea! did
any of thy lovers love thee as I do?
Twenty-four hours more till the moment of happiness--the moment for
which I seem to have been waiting all my life. And after that, what next?
Yes, I see it plainer every minute; after that, nothing more. All those who
loved Medea da Carpi, who loved and who served her, died: Giovanfrancesco
Pico, her first husband, whom she left stabbed in the castle from which she
fled; Stimigliano, who died of poison; the groom who gave him the poison,
cut down by her orders; Oliverotto da Narni, Marcantonio Frangipani, and
that poor boy of the Ordelaffi, who had never even looked upon
her face, and whose only reward was that handkerchief with which the hangman wiped the sweat off his face, when he was one mass of broken limbs and torn flesh: all had to die, and I shall die also.
The love of such a woman is enough, and is fatal--"Amour
Dure," as her device says. I shall die also. But why not? Would it be
possible to live in order to love another woman? Nay, would it be possible
to drag on a life like this one after the happiness of to-morrow?
Impossible; the others died, and I must die. I always felt that I should
not live long; a gipsy in Poland told me once that I had in my hand the
cut-line which signifies a violent death. I might have ended in a duel with
some brother-student, or in a railway accident. No, no; my death will not
be of that sort! Death--and is not she also dead? What strange vistas
does such a thought not open! Then the others--Pico, the Groom,
Stimigliano, Oliverotto, Frangipani, Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi--will
they all be there? But she shall love me best--me by whom
she has been loved after she has been three hundred years in the grave!
Dec. 24th.--I have made all my arrangements. To-night at eleven I
slip out; Sor Asdrubale and his sisters will be sound asleep. I have
questioned them; their fear of rheumatism prevents their attending midnight
mass. Luckily there are no churches between this and the Corte; whatever
movement Christmas night may entail will be a good
way off. The Vice-Prefect's rooms are on the other side of the palace; the rest of the square is taken up with state-rooms, archives, and empty stables and coach-houses of the palace. Besides, I shall be quick at my work.
I have tried my saw on a stout bronze vase I bought of Sor Asdrubale;
and the bronze of the statue, hollow and worn away by rust (I have even
noticed holes), cannot resist very much, especially after a blow with the
sharp hatchet. I have put my papers in order, for the benefit of the
Government which has sent me hither. I am sorry to have defrauded them of
their "History of Urbania." To pass the endless day and calm
the fever of impatience, I have just taken a long walk. This is the coldest
day we have had. The bright sun does not warm in the least, but seems only
to increase the impression of cold, to make the snow on the mountains
glitter, the blue air to sparkle like steel. The few people who are out are
muffled to the nose, and carry earthenware braziers beneath their cloaks;
long icicles hang from the fountain with the figure of Mercury upon it; one
can imagine the wolves trooping down through the dry scrub and beleaguering
this town. Somehow this cold makes me feel wonderfully calm--it seems
to bring back to me my boyhood.
As I walked up the rough, steep, paved alleys, slippery with frost, and
with their vista of snow mountains against the sky, and passed by the
church
steps strewn with box and laurel, with the faint smell of incense coming out, there returned to me--I know not why--the recollection, almost the sensation, of those Christmas Eves long ago at Posen and Breslau, when I walked as a child along the wide streets, peeping into the windows where they were beginning to light the tapers of the Christmas-trees, and wondering whether I too, on returning home, should be let into a wonderful room all blazing with lights and gilded nuts and glass beads. They are hanging the last strings of those blue and red metallic beads, fastening on the last gilded and silvered walnuts on the trees out there at home in the North; they are lighting the blue and red tapers; the wax is beginning to run on to the beautiful spruce green branches; the children are waiting with beating hearts behind the door, to be told that the Christ-Child has been. And I, for what am I waiting? I don't know; all seems a dream; everything vague and unsubstantial about me, as if time had ceased, nothing could happen, my own desires and hopes were all dead, myself absorbed into I know not what passive dreamland. Do I long for to-night? Do I dread it? Will to-night ever come? Do I feel anything, does anything exist all round me? I sit and seem to see that street at Posen, the wide street with the windows illuminated by the Christmas lights, the green fir-branches grazing the window-panes.
Christmas Eve, Midnight.--I have done it. I
slipped out noiselessly. Sor Asdrubale and his sisters were fast asleep. I feared I had waked them, for my hatchet fell as I was passing through the principal room where my landlord keeps his curiosities for sale; it struck against some old armour which he has been piecing. I heard him exclaim, half in his sleep; and blew out my light and hid in the stairs. He came out in his dressing-gown, but finding no one, went back to bed again. "Some cat, no doubt!" he said. I closed the house door softly behind me. The sky had become stormy since the afternoon, luminous with the full moon, but strewn with grey and buff-coloured vapours; every now and then the moon disappeared entirely. Not a creature abroad; the tall gaunt houses staring in the moonlight.
I know not why, I took a roundabout way to the Corte, past one or two
church doors, whence issued the faint flicker of midnight mass. For a
moment I felt a temptation to enter one of then; but something seemed to
restrain me. I caught snatches of the Christmas hymn. I felt myself
beginning to be unnerved, and hastened towards the Corte. As I passed under
the portico at San Francesco I heard steps behind me; it seemed to me that
I was followed. I stopped to let the other pass. As he approached his pace
flagged; he passed close by me and murmured, "Do not go: I am
Giovanfrancesco Pico." I turned round; he was gone. A coldness numbed
me; but I hastened on.
Behind the cathedral apse, in a narrow lane, I saw a man leaning against
a wall. The moonlight was full upon him; it seemed to me that his face,
with a thin pointed beard, was streaming with blood. I quickened my pace;
but as I grazed by him he whispered, "Do not obey her; return home: I
am Marcantonio Frangipani." My teeth chattered, but I hurried along
the narrow lane, with the moonlight blue upon the white walls.
At last I saw the Corte before me: the square was flooded with
moonlight, the windows of the palace seemed brightly illuminated, and the
statue of Duke Robert, shimmering green, seemed advancing towards me on its
horse. I came into the shadow. I had to pass beneath an archway. There
started a figure as if out of the wall, and barred my passage with his
outstretched cloaked arm. I tried to pass. He seized me by the arm, and his
grasp was like a weight of ice. "You shall not pass!" he cried,
and, as the moon came out once more, I saw his face, ghastly white and
bound with an embroidered kerchief; he seemed almost a child. "You
shall not pass!" he cried; "you shall not have her! She is
mine, and mine alone! I am Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi." I felt his
ice-cold clutch, but with my other arm I laid about me wildly with the
hatchet which I carried beneath my cloak. The hatchet struck the wall and
rang upon the stone. He had vanished.
I hurried on. I did it. I cut open the bronze; I sawed it into a wider
gash. I tore out the silver image, and hacked it into innumerable pieces.
As I scattered the last fragments about, the moon was suddenly veiled; a
great wind arose, howling down the square; it seemed to me that the earth
shook. I threw down the hatchet and the saw, and fled home. I felt pursued,
as if by the tramp of hundreds of invisible horsemen.
Now I am calm. It is midnight; another moment and she will be here!
Patience, my heart! I hear it beating loud. I trust that no one will accuse
poor Sor Asdrubale. I will write a letter to the authorities to declare his
innocence should anything happen.... One! the clock in the palace tower has
just struck.... "I hereby certify that, should anything happen this
night to me, Spiridion Trepka, no one but myself is to be held ..." A
step on the staircase! It is she! it is she! At last, Medea, Medea! Ah!
AMOUR DURE--DURE AMOUR!
___________________
beyond the olive woods, bluish-green in the sunshine and veined with violet under the cloud-bars, like one of your Ravenna mosaics spread out as pavement for the world: a wicked sea, wicked in its loveliness, wickeder than your grey northern ones, and from which must have arisen in times gone by (when Phoenicians or Greeks built the temples at Lerici and Porto Venere) a baleful goddess of beauty, a Venus Verticordia, but in the bad sense of the word, overwhelming men's lives in sudden darkness like that squall of last week.
To come to the point. I want you, dear Lady Evelyn, to promise me some
money, a great deal of money, as much as would buy you a little mannish
cloth frock--for the complete bringing-up, until years of discretion,
of a young stranger whom the sea has laid upon our shore. Our people, kind
as they are, are very poor, and overburdened with children; besides, they
have got a certain repugnance for this poor little waif, cast up by that
dreadful storm, and who is doubtless a heathen, for she had no little
crosses or scapulars on, like proper Christian children. So, being unable
to get any of our women to adopt the child, and having an old
bachelor's terror of my housekeeper, I have bethought me of certain
nuns, holy women, who teach little girls to say their prayers and make lace
close by here; and of your dear Excellency to pay for the whole
business.
Poor little brown mite! She was picked up after the storm (such a
set-out of ship-models and votive candles as that storm must have brought
the Madonna at Porto Venere!) on a strip of sand between the rocks of our
castle: the thing was really miraculous, for this coast is like a
shark's jaw, and the bits of sand are tiny and far between. She was
lashed to a plank, swaddled up close in outlandish garments; and when they
brought her to me they thought she must certainly be dead: a little girl of
four or five, decidedly pretty, and as brown as a berry, who, when she came
to, shook her head to show she understood no kind of Italian, and jabbered
some half-intelligible Eastern jabber, a few Greek words embedded in I know
not what; the Superior of the College De Propagandâ Fidē would
be puzzled to know. The child appears to be the only survivor from a ship
which must have gone down in the great squall, and whose timbers have been
strewing the bay for some days past; no one at Spezia or in any of our
ports knows anything about her, but she was seen, apparently making for
Porto Venere, by some of our sardine-fishers: a big, lumbering craft, with
eyes painted on each side of the prow, which, as you know, is a peculiarity
of Greek boats. She was sighted for the last time off the island of
Palmaria, entering, with all sails spread, right into the thick of the
storm-darkness. No bodies, strangely enough, have been washed ashore.
July 10.
I have received the money, dear Donna Evelina. There was tremendous
excitement down at San Massimo when the carrier came in with a registered
letter, and I was sent for, in presence of all the village authorities, to
sign my name on the postal register.
The child has already been settled some days with the nuns; such dear
little nuns (nuns always go straight to the heart of an old priest-hater
and conspirator against the Pope, you know), dressed in brown robes and
close, white caps, with an immense round straw-hat flapping behind their
heads like a nimbus: they are called Sisters of the Stigmata, and have a
convent and school at San Massimo, a little way inland, with an untidy
garden full of lavender and cherry-trees. Your
protégée has already half set the
convent, the village, the Episcopal See, the Order of St. Francis, by the
ears. First, because nobody could make out whether or not she had been
christened. The question was a grave one, for it appears (as your
uncle-in-law, the Cardinal, will tell you) that it is almost equally
undesirable to be christened twice over as not to be christened at all. The
first danger was finally decided upon as the less terrible; but the child,
they say, had evidently been baptized before, and knew that the operation
ought not to be repeated, for she kicked and plunged and yelled like twenty
little devils, and positively would not let the holy water touch her. The Mother Superior, who always took for granted that the baptism had taken place before, says that the child was quite right, and that Heaven was trying to prevent a sacrilege; but the priest and the barber's wife, who had to hold her, think the occurrence fearful, and suspect the little girl of being a Protestant. Then the question of the name. Pinned to her clothes--striped Eastern things, and that kind of crinkled silk stuff they weave in Crete and Cyprus--was a piece of parchment, a scapular we thought at first, but which was found to contain only the name Dionea--Dionea, as they pronounce it here. The question was, Could such a name be fitly borne by a young lady at the Convent of the Stigmata? Half the population here have names as unchristian quite--Norma, Odoacer, Archimedes--my housemaid is called Themis--but Dionea seemed to scandalise every one, perhaps because these good folk had a mysterious instinct that the name is derived from Dione, one of the loves of Father Zeus, and mother of no less a lady than the goddess Venus. The child was very near being called Maria, although there are already twenty-three other Marias, Mariettas, Mariuccias, and so forth at the convent. But the sister-bookkeeper, who apparently detests monotony, bethought her to look out Dionea first in the Calendar, which proved useless; and then in a big vellum-bound
book, printed at Venice in 1625, called "Flos Sanctorum, or Lives of the Saints, by Father Ribadeneira, S.J., with the addition of such Saints as have no assigned place in the Almanack, otherwise called the Movable or Extravagant Saints." The zeal of Sister Anna Maddalena has been rewarded, for there, among the Extravagant Saints, sure enough, with a border of palm-branches and hour-glasses, stands the name of Saint Dionea, Virgin and Martyr, a lady of Antioch, put to death by the Emperor Decius. I know your Excellency's taste for historical information, so I forward this item. But I fear, dear Lady Evelyn, I fear that the heavenly patroness of your little sea-waif was a much more extravagant saint than that.
December 21, 1879.
Many thanks, dear Donna Evelina, for the money for Dionea's
schooling. Indeed, it was not wanted yet: the accomplishments of young
ladies are taught at a very moderate rate at Montemirto: and as to clothes,
which you mention, a pair of wooden clogs, with pretty red tips, costs
sixty-five centimes, and ought to last three years, if the owner is careful
to carry them on her head in a neat parcel when out walking, and to put
them on again only on entering the village. The Mother Superior is greatly
overcome by your Excellency's munificence towards the convent, and
much perturbed at being unable to send you a specimen of
your protégée's skill, exemplified in an embroidered pocket-handkerchief or a pair of mittens; but the fact is that poor Dionea has no skill. "We will pray to the Madonna and St. Francis to make her more worthy," remarked the Superior. Perhaps, however, your Excellency, who is, I fear but a Pagan woman (for all the Savelli Popes and St. Andrew Savelli's miracles), and insufficiently appreciative of embroidered pocket-handkerchiefs, will be quite as satisfied to hear that Dionea, instead of skill, has got the prettiest face of any little girl in Montemirto. She is tall, for her age (she is eleven) quite wonderfully well proportioned and extremely strong: of all the convent-full, she is the only one for whom I have never been called in. The features are very regular, the hair black, and despite all the good Sisters' efforts to keep it smooth like a Chinaman's, beautifully curly. I am glad she should be pretty, for she will more easily find a husband; and also because it seems fitting that your protégée should be beautiful. Unfortunately her character is not so satisfactory: she hates learning, sewing, washing up the dishes, all equally. I am sorry to say she shows no natural piety. Her companions detest her, and the nuns, although they admit that she is not exactly naughty, seem to feel her as a dreadful thorn in the flesh. She spends hours and hours on the terrace overlooking the sea (her great desire, she confided to me, is to get to the sea--to
get back to the sea, as she expressed it), and lying in the garden, under the big myrtle-bushes, and, in spring and summer, under the rose-hedge. The nuns say that rose-hedge and that myrtle-bush are growing a great deal too big, one would think from Dionea's lying under them; the fact, I suppose, has drawn attention to them. "That child makes all the useless weeds grow," remarked Sister Reparata. Another of Dionea's amusements is playing with pigeons. The number of pigeons she collects about her is quite amazing; you would never have thought that San Massimo or the neighbouring hills contained as many. They flutter down like snowflakes, and strut and swell themselves out, and furl and unfurl their tails, and peck with little sharp movements of their silly, sensual heads and a little throb and gurgle in their throats, while Dionea lies stretched out full length in the sun, putting out her lips, which they come to kiss, and uttering strange, cooing sounds; or hopping about, flapping her arms slowly like wings, and raising her little head with much the same odd gesture as they;--'tis a lovely sight, a thing fit for one of your painters, Burne Jones or Tadema, with the myrtle-bushes all round, the bright, white-washed convent walls behind, the white marble chapel steps (all steps are marble in this Carrara country), and the enamel blue sea through the ilex-branches beyond. But the good Sisters abominate these pigeons, who, it appears, are
messy little creatures, and they complain that, were it not that the Reverend Director likes a pigeon in his pot on a holiday, they could not stand the bother of perpetually sweeping the chapel steps and the kitchen threshold all along of those dirty birds....
August 6, 1882.
Do not tempt me, dearest Excellency, with your invitations to Rome. I
should not be happy there, and do but little honour to your friendship. My
many years of exile, of wanderings in northern countries, have made me a
little bit into a northern man: I cannot quite get on with my own
fellow-countrymen, except with the good peasants and fishermen all round.
Besides--forgive the vanity of an old man, who has learned to make
triple acrostic sonnets to cheat the days and months at Theresienstadt and
Spielberg--I have suffered too much for Italy to endure patiently the
sight of little parliamentary cabals and municipal wranglings, although
they also are necessary in this day as conspiracies and battles were in
mine. I am not fit for your roomful of ministers and learned men and pretty
women: the former would think me an ignoramus, and the latter--what
would afflict me much more--a pedant.... Rather, if your Excellency
really wants to show yourself and your children to your father's old
protégé of Mazzinian times, find
a few days to come here next spring.
You shall have some very bare rooms with brick floors and white curtains opening out on my terrace; and a dinner of all manner of fish and milk (the white garlic flowers shall be mown away from under the olives lest my cow should eat it) and eggs cooked in herbs plucked in the hedges. Your boys can go and see the big ironclads at Spezia; and you shall come with me up our lanes fringed with delicate ferns and overhung by big olives, and into the fields where the cherry-trees shed their blossoms on to the budding vines, the fig-trees stretching out their little green gloves, where the goats nibble perched on their hind legs, and the cows low in the huts of reeds; and there rise from the ravines, with the gurgle of the brooks, from the cliffs with the boom of the surf, the voices of unseen boys and girls, singing about love and flowers and death, just as in the days of Theocritus, whom your learned Excellency does well to read. Has your Excellency ever read Longus, a Greek pastoral novelist? He is a trifle free, a trifle nude for us readers of Zola; but the old French of Amyot has a wonderful charm, and he gives one an idea, as no one else does, how folk lived in such valleys, by such sea-boards, as these in the days when daisy-chains and garlands of roses were still hung on the olive-trees for the nymphs of the grove; when across the bay, at the end of the narrow neck of blue sea, there clung to the marble rocks not a church of Saint Laurence, with the
sculptured martyr on his gridiron, but the temple of Venus, protecting her harbour.... Yes, dear Lady Evelyn, you have guessed aright. Your old friend has returned to his sins, and is scribbling once more. But no longer at verses or political pamphlets. I am enthralled by a tragic history, the history of the fall of the Pagan Gods.... Have you ever read of their wanderings and disguises, in my friend Heine's little book?
And if you come to Montemirto, you shall see also your
protégée, of whom you ask for
news. It has just missed being disastrous. Poor Dionea! I fear that early
voyage tied to the spar did no good to her wits, poor little waif! There
has been a fearful row; and it has required all my influence, and all the
awfulness of your Excellency's name, and the Papacy, and the Holy
Roman Empire, to prevent her expulsion by the Sisters of the Stigmata. It
appears that this mad creature very nearly committed a sacrilege: she was
discovered handling in a suspicious manner the Madonna's gala frock
and her best veil of pizzo di Cantù, a
gift of the late Marchioness Violante Vigalcila of Fornovo. One of the
orphans, Zaira Barsanti, whom they call the Rossaccia, even pretends to
have surprised Dionea as she was about to adorn her wicked little person
with these sacred garments; and, on another occasion, when Dionea had been
sent to pass some oil and sawdust over the chapel floor (it was the eve of
Easter of the
Roses), to have discovered her seated on the edge of the altar, in the very place of the Most Holy Sacrament. I was sent for in hot haste, and had to assist at an ecclesiastical council in the convent parlour, where Dionea appeared, rather out of place, an amazing little beauty, dark, lithe, with an odd, ferocious gleam in her eyes, and a still odder smile, tortuous, serpentine, like that of Leonardo da Vinci's women, among the plaster images of St. Francis, and the glazed and framed samplers before the little statue of the Virgin, which wears in summer a kind of mosquito-curtain to guard it from the flies, who, as you know, are creatures of Satan.
Speaking of Satan, does your Excellency know that on the inside of our
little convent door, just above the little perforated plate of metal (like
the rose of a watering-pot) through which the Sister-portress peeps and
talks, is pasted a printed form, an arrangement of holy names and texts in
triangles, and the stigmatised hands of St. Francis, and a variety of other
devices, for the purpose, as is explained in a special notice, of baffling
the Evil One, and preventing his entrance into that building? Had you seen
Dionea, and the stolid, contemptuous way in which she took, without
attempting to refute, the various shocking allegations against her, your
Excellency would have reflected, as I did, that the door in question must
have been accidentally absent from the premises, perhaps at the
joiner's for repair, the day that
your protégée first penetrated into the convent. The ecclesiastical tribunal, consisting of the Mother Superior, three Sisters, the Capuchin Director, and your humble servant (who vainly attempted to be Devil's advocate), sentenced Dionea, among other things, to make the sign of the cross twenty-six times on the bare floor with her tongue. Poor little child! One might almost expect that, as happened when Dame Venus scratched her hand on the thorn-bush, red roses should sprout up between the fissures of the dirty old bricks.
October 14, 1883.
You ask whether, now that the Sisters let Dionea go and do half a
day's service now and then in the village, and that Dionea is a
grown-up creature, she does not set the place by the ears with her beauty.
The people here are quite aware of its existence. She is already dubbed
La bella Dionea; but that does not bring her
any nearer getting a husband, although your Excellency's generous
offer of a wedding-portion is well known throughout the district of San
Massimo and Montemirto. None of our boys, peasants or fishermen, seem to
hang on her steps; and if they turn round to stare and whisper as she goes
by straight and dainty in her wooden clogs, with the pitcher of water or
the basket of linen on her beautiful crisp dark head, it is, I remark, with
an expression rather of fear than of love. The women, on their side, make
horns with their fingers as she passes, and as they sit by her side in the convent chapel; but that seems natural. My housekeeper tells me that down in the village she is regarded as possessing the evil eye and bringing love misery. "You mean," I said, "that a glance from her is too much for our lads' peace of mind." Veneranda shook her head, and explained, with the deference and contempt with which she always mentions any of her countryfolk's superstitions to me, that the matter is different: it's not with her they are in love (they would be afraid of her eye), but where-ever she goes the young people must needs fall in love with each other, and usually where it is far from desirable. "You know Sora Luisa, the blacksmith's widow? Well, Dionea did a half-service for her last month, to prepare for the wedding of Luisa's daughter. Well, now, the girl must say, forsooth! that she won't have Pieriho of Lerici any longer, but will have that raggamuffin Wooden Pipe from Solaro, or go into a convent. And the girl changed her mind the very day that Dionea had come into the house. Then there is the wife of Pippo, the coffee-house keeper; they say she is carrying on with one of the coastguards, and Dionea helped her to do her washing six weeks ago. The son of Sor Temistocle has just cut off a linger to avoid the conscription, because he is mad about his cousin and afraid of being taken for a soldier; and it is a fact that some of the
shirts which were made for him at the Stigmata had been sewn by Dionea;"... and thus a perfect string of love misfortunes, enough to make a little "Decameron," I assure you, and all laid to Dionea's account. Certain it is that the people of San Massimo are terribly afraid of Dionea....
July 17, 1884.
Dionea's strange influence seems to be extending in a terrible way.
I am almost beginning to think that our folk are correct in their fear of
the young witch. I used to think, as physician to a convent, that nothing
was more erroneous than all the romancings of Diderot and Schubert (your
Excellency sang me his "Young Nun" once: do you recollect, just
before your marriage?), and that no more humdrum creature existed than one
of our little nuns, with their pink baby faces under their tight white
caps. It appeared the romancing was more correct than the prose. Unknown
things have sprung up in these good Sisters' hearts, as unknown
flowers have sprung up among the myrtle-bushes and the rose-hedge which
Dionea lies under. Did I ever mention to you a certain little Sister
Giuliana, who professed only two years ago?--a funny rose and white
little creature presiding over the infirmary, as prosaic a little saint as
ever kissed a crucifix or scoured a saucepan. Well, Sister Giuliana has
disappeared, and the same day has disappeared also a sailor-boy from the
port.
August 20, 1884.
The case of Sister Giuliana seems to have been but the beginning of an
extraordinary love epidemic at the Convent of the Stigmata: the elder
schoolgirls have to be kept under lock and key lest they should talk over
the wall in the moonlight, or steal out to the little hunchback who writes
love-letters at a penny a-piece, beautiful flourishes and all, under the
portico by the Fishmarket. I wonder does that wicked little Dionea, whom no
one pays court to, smile (her lips like a Cupid's bow or a tiny
snake's curves) as she calls the pigeons down around her, or lies
fondling the cats under the myrtle-bush, when she sees the pupils going
about with swollen, red eyes; the poor little nuns taking fresh penances on
the cold chapel flags; and hears the long-drawn guttural vowels,
amore and morte and
mio bene, which rise up of an evening, with the
boom of the surf and the scent of the lemon-flowers, as the young men
wander up and down, arm-in-arm, twanging their guitars along the moonlit
lanes under the olives?
October 20, 1885.
A terrible, terrible thing has happened! I write to your Excellency with
hands all a-tremble; and yet I must write, I must speak, or
else I shall cry out. Did I ever mention to you Father Domenico of Casoria,
the confessor of our Convent of the
Stigmata? A young man, tall, emaciated with fasts and vigils, but handsome like the monk playing the virginal in Giorgione's "Concert," and under his brown serge still the most stalwart fellow of the country all round? One has heard of men struggling with the tempter. Well, well, Father Domenico had struggled as hard as any of the Anchorites recorded by St. Jerome, and he had conquered. I never knew anything comparable to the angelic serenity of gentleness of this victorious soul. I don't like monks, but I loved Father Domenico. I might have been his father, easily, yet I always felt a certain shyness and awe of him; and yet men have accounted me a clean-lived man in my generation; but I felt, whenever I approached him, a poor worldly creature, debased by the knowledge of so many mean and ugly things. Of late Father Domenico had seemed to me less calm than usual: his eyes had grown strangely bright, and red spots had formed on his salient cheekbones. One day last week, taking his hand, I felt his pulse flutter, and all his strength as it were, liquefy under my touch. "You are ill," I said. "You have fever, Father Domenico. You have been overdoing yourself--some new privation, some new penance. Take care and do not tempt Heaven; remember the flesh is weak." Father Domenico withdrew his hand quickly. "Do not say that," he cried; "the flesh is strong!" and turned away his face. His eyes were glistening and he
shook all over. "Some quinine," I ordered. But I felt it was no case for quinine. Prayers might be more useful, and could I have given them he should not have wanted. Last night I was suddenly sent for to Father Domenico's monastery above Montemirto: they told me he was ill. I ran up through the dim twilight of moonbeams and olives with a sinking heart. Something told me my monk was dead. He was lying in a little low whitewashed room; they had carried him there from his own cell in hopes he might still be alive. The windows were wide open; they framed some olive-branches, glistening in the moonlight, and far below, a strip of moonlit sea. When I told them that he was really dead, they brought some tapers and lit them at his head and feet, and placed a crucifix between his hands. "The Lord has been pleased to call our poor brother to Him," said the Superior. "A case of apoplexy, my dear Doctor--a case of apoplexy. You will make out the certificate for the authorities." I made out the certificate. It was weak of me. But, after all, why make a scandal? He certainly had no wish to injure the poor monks.
Next day I found the little nuns all in tears. They were gathering
flowers to send as a last gift to their confessor. In the convent garden I
found Dionea, standing by the side of a big basket of roses, one of the
white pigeons perched on her shoulder.
"So," she said, "he has killed himself with charcoal,
poor Padre Domenico!"
Something in her tone, her eyes, shocked me.
"God has called to Himself one of His most faithful
servants," I said gravely.
Standing opposite this girl, magnificent, radiant in her beauty, before
the rose-hedge, with the white pigeons furling and unfurling, strutting and
pecking all round, I seemed to see suddenly the whitewashed room of last
night, the big crucifix, that poor thin face under the yellow waxlight. I
felt glad for Father Domenico; his battle was over.
"Take this to Father Domenico from me," said Dionea,
breaking off a twig of myrtle starred over with white blossom; and raising
her head with that smile like the twist of a young snake, she sang out in a
high guttural voice a strange chaunt, consisting of the word
Amor--amor--amor. I took the branch
of myrtle and threw it in her face.
January 3, 1886
It will be difficult to find a place for Dionea, and in this
neighbourhood well-nigh impossible. The people associate her somehow with
the death of Father Domenico, which has confirmed her reputation of having
the evil eye. She left the convent (being now seventeen) some two months
back, and is at present gaining her bread working with the
masons at our notary's new house at Lerici: the work is hard, but our women often do it, and it is magnificent to see Dionea, in her short white skirt and tight white bodice, mixing the smoking lime with her beautiful strong arms; or, an empty sack drawn over her head and shoulders, walking majestically up the cliff, up the scaffoldings with her load of bricks.... I am, however, very anxious to get Dionea out of the neighbourhood, because I cannot help dreading the annoyances to which her reputation for the evil eye exposes her, and even some explosion of rage if ever she should lose the indifferent contempt with which she treats them. I hear that one of the rich men of our part of the world, a certain Sor Agostino of Sarzana, who owns a whole flank of marble mountain, is looking out for a maid for his daughter, who is about to be married; kind people and patriarchal in their riches, the old man still sitting down to table with all his servants; and his nephew, who is going to be his son-in-law, a splendid young fellow, who has worked like Jacob, in the quarry and at the saw-mill, for love of his pretty cousin. That whole house is so good, simple, and peaceful, that I hope it may tame down even Dionea. If I do not succeed in getting Dionea this place (and all your Excellency's illustriousness and all my poor eloquence will be needed to counteract the sinister reports attaching to our poor little waif), it will be best to accept your suggestion of taking the girl
into your household at Rome, since you are curious to see what you call our baleful beauty. I am amused, and a little indignant at what you say about your footmen being handsome: Don Juan himself, my dear Lady Evelyn, would be cowed by Dionea....
May 29, 1886.
Here is Dionea back upon our hands once more! but I cannot send her to
your Excellency. Is it from living among these peasants and fishing-folk,
or is it because, as people pretend, a sceptic is always superstitious? I
could not muster courage to send you Dionea, although your boys are still
in sailor-clothes and your uncle, the Cardinal, is eighty-four; and as to
the Prince, why, he bears the most potent amulet against Dionea's
terrible powers in your own dear capricious person. Seriously, there is
something eerie in this coincidence. Poor Dionea! I feel sorry for her,
exposed to the passion of a once patriarchally respectable old man. I feel
even more abashed at the incredible audacity, I should almost say
sacrilegious madness, of the vile old creature. But still the coincidence
is strange and uncomfortable. Last week the lightning struck a huge olive
in the orchard of Sor Agostino's house above Sarzana. Under the olive
was Sor Agostino himself, who was killed on the spot; and opposite, not
twenty paces off, drawing water from the well, unhurt and calm, was Dionea.
It was the end of a sultry afternoon: I was on a terrace in one of those villages of ours, jammed, like some hardy bush, in the gash of a hill-side. I saw the storm rush down the valley, a sudden blackness, and then, like a curse, a flash, a tremendous crash, re-echoed by a dozen hills. "I told him," Dionea said very quietly, when she came to stay with me the next day (for Sor Agostino's family would not have her for another half-minute), "that if he did not leave me alone Heaven would send him an accident."
July 15, 1886.
My book? Oh, dear Donna Evelina, do not make me blush by talking of my
book! Do not make an old man, respectable, a Government functionary
(communal physician of the district of San Massimo and Montemirto Ligure),
confess that he is but a lazy unprofitable dreamer, collecting materials as
a child picks hips out of a hedge, only to throw them away, liking them
merely for the little occupation of scratching his hands and standing on
tiptoe, for their pretty redness.... You remember what Balzac says about
projecting any piece of work?--"C'est
fumier des cigarettes enchantées.."... Well, well!
The data obtainable about the ancient gods in their days of adversity are
few and far between: a quotation here and there from the Fathers; two or
three legends; Venus reappearing; the persecutions of Apollo in
Styria; Proserpina going, in Chaucer, to reign over the fairies; a few obscure religious persecutions in the Middle Ages on the score of Paganism; some strange rites practised till lately in the depths of a Breton forest near Lannion.... As to Tannhäuser, he was a real knight, and a sorry one, and a real Minnesinger not of the best. Your Excellency will find some of his poems in Von der Hagen's four immense volumes, but I recommend you to take your notions of Ritter Tannhäuser's poetry rather from Wagner. Certain it is that the Pagan divinities lasted much longer than we suspect, sometimes in their own nakedness, sometimes in the stolen garb of the Madonna or the saints. Who knows whether they do not exist to this day? And, indeed, is it possible they should not? For the awfulness of the deep woods, with their filtered green light, the creak of the swaying, solitary reeds, exists, and is Pan; and the blue, starry May night exists, the sough of the waves, the warm wind carrying the sweetness of the lemon-blossoms, the bitterness of the myrtle on our rocks, the distant chaunt of the boys cleaning out their nets, of the girls sickling the grass under the olives, Amor--amor--amor, and all this is the great goddess Venus. And opposite to me, as I write, between the branches of the ilexes, across the blue sea, streaked like a Ravenna mosaic with purple and green, shimmer the white houses and walls, the steeple and towers, an enchanted Fata Morgana city, of dim Porto
Venere;... and I mumble to myself the verse of Catullus, but addressing a greater and more terrible goddess than he did :--
"Procul a mea sit furor omnis, Hera, domo; alios; age incitatos,
alios age rabidos."
March 25, 1887.
Yes; I will do everything in my power for your friends. Are you
well-bred folk as well bred as we, Republican
bourgeois, with the coarse hands (though you
once told me mine were psychic hands when the mania of palmistry had not
yet been succeeded by that of the Reconciliation between Church and State),
I wonder, that you should apologise, you whose father fed me and housed me
and clothed me in my exile, for giving me the horrid trouble of hunting for
lodgings? It is like you, dear Donna Evelina, to have sent me photographs
of my future friend Waldemar's statue.... I have no love for modern
sculpture, for all the hours I have spent in Gibson's and
Dupré's studio: 'tis a dead art we should do better to
bury. But your Waldemar has something of the old spirit: he seems to feel
the divineness of the mere body, the spirituality of a limpid stream of
mere physical life. But why among these statues only men and boys, athletes
and fauns? Why only the bust of that thin, delicate-lipped little Madonna
wife of his? Why no wide-shouldered Amazon or broad-flanked Aphrodite?
April 10, 1887.
You ask me how poor Dionea is getting on. Not as your Excellency and I
ought to have expected when we placed her with the good Sisters of the
Stigmata: although I wager that, fantastic and capricious as you are, you
would be better pleased (hiding it carefully from that grave side of you
which bestows devout little books and carbolic acid upon the indigent) that
your protégée should be a witch
than a serving-maid, a maker of philters rather than a knitter of stockings
and sewer of shirts.
A maker of philters. Roughly speaking, that is Dionea's profession.
She lives upon the money which I dole out to her (with many useless
objurgations) on behalf of your Excellency; and her ostensible employment
is mending nets, collecting olives, carrying bricks, and other
miscellaneous jobs; but her real status is that of village sorceress. You
think our peasants are sceptical? Perhaps they do not believe in
thought-reading, mesmerism, and ghosts, like you, dear Lady Evelyn. But
they believe very firmly in the evil eye, in magic, and in love-potions.
Every one has his little story of this or that which happened to his
brother or cousin or neighbour. My stable-boy and male factotum's
brother-in-law, living some years ago in Corsica, was seized with a longing
for a dance with his beloved at one of those balls which our
peasants give in the winter, when the snow makes leisure in the mountains. A wizard anointed him for money, and straightway he turned into a black cat, and in three bounds was over the seas, at the door of his uncle's cottage, and among the dancers. He caught his beloved by the skirt to draw her attention; but she replied with a kick which sent him squealing back to Corsica. When he returned in summer he refused to marry the lady, and carried his left arm in a sling. "You broke it when I came to the Veglia!" he said, and all seemed explained. Another lad, returning from working in the vineyards near Marseilles, was walking up to his native village, high in our hills, one moonlight night. He heard sounds of fiddle and fife from a roadside barn, and saw yellow light from its chinks; and then entering, he found many women dancing, old and young, and among them his affianced. He tried to snatch her round the waist for a waltz (they play Mme. Angot at our rustic balls), but the girl was unclutchable, and whispered, "Go; for these are witches, who will kill thee; and I am a witch also. Alas! I shall go to hell when I die."
I could tell your Excellency dozens of such stories. But love-philters
are among the commonest things to sell and buy. Do you remember the sad
little story of Cervantes' Licentiate, who, instead of a love-potion,
drank a philter which made him think he was made of glass, fit emblem of a
poor
mad poet? ... It is love-philters that Dionea prepares. No; do not misunderstand; they do not give love of her, still less her love. Your seller of love-charms is as cold as ice, as pure as snow. The priest has crusaded against her, and stones have flown at her as she went by from dissatisfied lovers; and the very children, paddling in the sea and making mud-pies in the sand, have put out forefinger and little finger and screamed, "Witch, witch! ugly witch!" as she passed with basket or brick load; but Dionea has only smiled, that snake-like, amused smile, but more ominous than of yore. The other day I determined to seek her and argue with her on the subject of her evil trade. Dionea has a certain regard for me; not, I fancy, a result of gratitude, but rather the recognition of a certain admiration and awe which she inspires in your Excellency's foolish old servant. She has taken up her abode in a deserted hut, built of dried reeds and thatch, such as they keep cows in, among the olives on the cliffs. She was not there, but about the hut pecked some white pigeons, and from it, startling me foolishly with its unexpected sound, came the eerie bleat of her pet goat.... Among the olives it was twilight already, with streakings of faded rose in the sky, and faded rose, like long trails of petals, on the distant sea. I clambered down among the myrtle-bushes and came to a little semicircle of yellow sand, between two high and jagged rocks, the place where the sea had
deposited Dionea after the wreck. She was seated there on the sand, her bare foot dabbling in the waves; she had twisted a wreath of myrtle and wild roses on her black, crisp hair. Near her was one of our prettiest girls, the Lena of Sor Tullio the blacksmith, with ashy, terrified face under her flowered kerchief. I determined to speak to the child, but without startling her now, for she is a nervous, hysteric little thing. So I sat on the rocks, screened by the myrtle-bushes, waiting till the girl had gone. Dionea, seated listless on the sands, leaned over the sea and took some of its water in the hollow of her hand. "Here," she said to the Lena of Sor Tullio, "fill your bottle with this and give it to drink to Tommasino the Rosebud." Then she set to singing:--
"Love is salt, like sea-water--I drink and I die of
thirst.... Water! water! Yet the more I drink, the more I burn. Love! thou
art bitter as the seaweed."
April 20, 1887.
Your friends are settled here, dear Lady Evelyn. The house is built in
what was once a Genoese fort, growing like a grey spiked aloes out of the
marble rocks of our bay; rock and wall (the walls existed long before Genoa
was ever heard of) grown almost into a homogeneous mass, delicate grey,
stained with black and yellow lichen, and dotted here and there with
myrtle-shoots and crim-
son snapdragon. In what was once the highest enclosure of the fort, where your friend Gertrude watches the maids hanging out the fine white sheets and pillow-cases to dry (a bit of the North, of Hermann and Dorothea transferred to the South), a great twisted fig-tree juts out like an eccentric gurgoyle over the sea, and drops its ripe fruit into the deep blue pools. There is but scant furniture in the house, but a great oleander overhangs it, presently to burst into pink splendour; and on all the window-sills, even that of the kitchen (such a background of shining brass saucepans Waldemar's wife has made of it!) are pipkins and tubs full of trailing carnations, and tufts of sweet basil and thyme and mignonette. She pleases me most, your Gertrude, although you foretold I should prefer the husband; with her thin white face, a Memling Madonna finished by some Tuscan sculptor, and her long, delicate white hands ever busy, like those of a mediæval lady, with some delicate piece of work; and the strange blue, more limpid than the sky and deeper than the sea, of her rarely lifted glance.
It is in her company that I like Waldemar best; I prefer to the genius
that infinitely tender and respectful, I would not say
lover--yet I have no other word--of his pale wife.
He seems to me, when with her, like some fierce, generous, wild thing from
the woods, like the lion of Una, tame and submissive to this saint.... This
tenderness
is really very beautiful on the part of that big lion Waldemar, with his odd eyes, as of some wild animal--odd, and, your Excellency remarks, not without a gleam of latent ferocity. I think that hereby hangs the explanation of his never doing any but male figures: the female figure, he says (and your Excellency must hold him responsible, not me, for such profanity), is almost inevitably inferior in strength and beauty; woman is not form, but expression, and therefore suits painting, but not sculpture. The point of a woman is not her body, but (and here his eyes rested very tenderly upon the thin white profile of his wife) her soul. "Still," I answered, "the ancients, who understood such matters, did manufacture some tolerable female statues: the Fates of the Parthenon, the Phidian Pallas, the Venus of Milo." ...
"Ah! yes," exclaimed Waldemar, smiling, with that savage
gleam of his eyes; "but those are not women, and the people who made
them have left as the tales of Endymion, Adonis, Anchises: a goddess might
sit for them." ...
May 5, 1887.
Has it ever struck your Excellency in one of your La Rochefoucauld fits
(in Lent say, after too many balls) that not merely maternal but conjugal
unselfishness may be a very selfish thing? There! you toss your little head
at my words; yet I wager
I have heard you say that other women may think it right to humour their husbands, but as to you, the Prince must learn that a wife's duty is as much to chasten her husband's whims as to satisfy them. I really do feel indignant that such a snow-white saint should wish another woman to part with all instincts of modesty merely because that other woman would be a good model for her husband; really it is intolerable. "Leave the girl alone," Waldemar said, laughing. "What do I want with the unæsthetic sex, as Schopenhauer calls it?" But Gertrude has set her heart on his doing a female figure; it seems that folk have twitted him with never having produced one. She has long been on the look-out for a model for him. It is odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not the more earthly for approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of our village with the eyes of a slave-dealer.
"If you insist on speaking to Dionea," I said, "I
shall insist on speaking to her at the same time, to urge her to refuse
your proposal." But Waldemar's pale wife was indifferent to all
my speeches about modesty being a poor girl's only dowry. "She
will do for a Venus," she merely answered.
We went up to the cliffs together, after some sharp words,
Waldemar's wife hanging on my arm as we slowly clambered up the stony
path among the olives. We found Dionea at the door of her
hut, making faggots of myrtle-branches. She listened sullenly to Gertrude's offer and explanations; indifferently to my admonitions not to accept. The thought of stripping for the view of a man, which would send a shudder through our most brazen village girls, seemed not to startle her, immaculate and savage as she is accounted. She did not answer, but sat under the olives, looking vaguely across the sea. At that moment Waldemar came up to us; he had followed with the intention of putting an end to these wranglings.
"Gertrude," he said, "do leave her alone. I have found
a model--a fisher-boy, whom I much prefer to any woman."
Dionea raised her head with that serpentine smile. "I will
come," she said.
Waldemar stood silent; his eyes were fixed on her, where she stood under
the olives, her white shift loose about her splendid throat, her shining
feet bare in the grass. Vaguely, as if not knowing what he said, he asked
her name. She answered that her name was Dionea; for the rest, she was an
Innocentina, that is to say, a foundling; then she began to sing:--
"Flower of the myrtle!
My father is the starry
sky;
The mother that made me is the sea."
June 22, 1887.
I confess I was an old fool to have grudged
Waldemar his model. As I watch him gradually building up his statue, watch the goddess gradually emerging from the clay heap, I ask myself--and the case might trouble a more subtle moralist than me--whether a village girl, an obscure, useless life within the bounds of what we choose to call right and wrong, can be weighed against the possession by mankind of a great work of art, a Venus immortally beautiful? Still, I am glad that the two alternatives need not be weighed against each other. Nothing can equal the kindness of Gertrude, now that Dionea has consented to sit to her husband; the girl is ostensibly merely a servant like any other; and, lest any report of her real functions should get abroad and discredit her at San Massimo or Montemirto, she is to be taken to Rome, where no one will be the wiser, and where, by the way, your Excellency will have an opportunity of comparing Waldemar's goddess of love with our little orphan of the Convent of the Stigmata. What reassures me still more is the curious attitude of Waldemar towards the girl. I could never have believed that an artist could regard a woman so utterly as a mere inanimate thing, a form to copy, like a tree or flower. Truly he carries out his theory that sculpture knows only the body, and the body scarcely considered as human. The way in which he speaks to Dionea after hours of the most rapt contemplation of her is almost brutal in its coldness. And yet to hear him
exclaim, "How beautiful she is! Good God, how beautiful!" No love of mere woman was ever so violent as this love of woman's mere shape.
June 27, 1887.
You asked me once, dearest Excellency, whether there survived among our
people (you had evidently added a volume on folk-lore to that heap of
half-cut, dog's-eared books that litter about among the Chineseries
and mediæval brocades of your rooms) any trace of Pagan myths. I
explained to you then that all our fairy mythology, classic gods, and
demons and heroes, teemed with fairies, ogres, and princes. Last night I
had a curious proof of this. Going to see the Waldemar, I found Dionea
seated under the oleander at the top of the old Genoese fort, telling
stories to the two little blonde children who were making the falling pink
blossoms into necklaces at her feet; the pigeons, Dionea's white
pigeons, which never leave her, strutting and pecking among the basil pots,
and the white gulls flying round the rocks overhead. This is what I
heard... "And the three fairies said to the youngest son of the King,
to the one who had been brought up as a shepherd, 'Take this apple,
and give it to her among us who is most beautiful.' And the first
fairy said, 'If thou give it to me thou shalt be Emperor of Rome, and
have purple clothes, and have a gold crown and gold armour, and horses and
courtiers;' and the
second said, 'If thou give it to me thou shalt be Pope, and wear a mitre, and have the keys of heaven and hell;' and the third fairy said, 'Give the apple to me, for I will give thee the most beautiful lady to wife.' And the youngest son of the King sat in the green meadow and thought about it a little, and then said, 'What use is there in being Emperor or Pope? Give me the beautiful lady to wife, since I am young myself.' And he gave the apple to the third of the three fairies." ...
Dionea droned out the story in her half-Genoese dialect, her eyes
looking far away across the blue sea, dotted with sails like white
sea-gulls, that strange serpentine smile on her lips.
"Who told thee that fable?" I asked.
She took a handful of oleander-blossoms from the ground, and throwing
them in the air, answered listlessly, as she watched the little shower of
rosy petals descend on her black hair and pale breast--
"Who knows?"
July 6, 1887.
How strange is the power of art! Has Waldemar's statue shown me the
real Dionea, or has Dionea really grown more strangely beautiful than
before? Your Excellency will laugh; but when I meet her I cast down my eyes
after the first glimpse of her loveliness; not with the shyness of a
ridiculous old pursuer of the Eternal Feminine, but with a sort of
religious awe--the feeling with
which, as a child kneeling by my mother's side, I looked down on the church flags when the Mass bell told the elevation of the Host.... Do you remember the story of Zeuxis and the ladies of Crotona, five of the fairest not being too much for his Juno? Do you remember--you, who have read everything--all the bosh of our writers about the Ideal in Art? Why, here is a girl who disproves all this nonsense in a minute; she is far, far more beautiful than Waldemar's statue of her. He said so angrily, only yesterday, when his wife took me into his studio (he has made a studio of the long-desecrated chapel of the old Genoese fort, itself, they say, occupying the site of the temple of Venus).
As he spoke that odd spark of ferocity dilated in his eyes, and seizing
the largest of his modelling tools, he obliterated at one swoop the whole
exquisite face. Poor Gertrude turned ashy white, and a convulsion passed
over her face...
July 15.
I wish I could make Gertrude understand, and yet I could never, never
bring myself to say a word. As a matter of fact, what is there to be said?
Surely she knows best that her husband will never love any woman but
herself. Yet ill, nervous as she is, I quite understand that she must
loathe this unceasing talk of Dionea, of the superiority of the model over
the statue. Cursed statue! I wish it were finished, or else that it had
never been begun.
July 20.
This morning Waldemar came to me. He seemed strangely agitated: I
guessed he had something to tell me, and yet I could never ask. Was it
cowardice on my part? He sat in my shuttered room, the sunshine making
pools on the red bricks and tremulous stars on the ceiling, talking of many
things at random, and mechanically turning over the manuscript, the heap of
notes of my poor, never-finished book on the Exiled Gods. Then he rose, and
walking nervously round my study, talking disconnectedly about his work,
his eye suddenly fell upon a little altar, one of my few antiquities, a
little block of marble with a carved garland and rams' heads, and a
half-effaced inscription dedicating it to Venus, the mother of Love.
"It was found," I explained, "in the ruins of the
temple, somewhere on the site of your studio: so, at least, the man said
from whom I bought it."
Waldemar looked at it long. "So," he said, "this
little cavity was to burn the incense in; or rather, I suppose, since it
has two little gutters running into it, for collecting the blood of the
victim? Well, well! they were wiser in that day, to wring the neck of a
pigeon or burn a pinch of incense than to eat their own hearts out, as we
do, all along of Dame Venus;" and he laughed, and left me with that
odd ferocious lighting-up of his face. Presently there came a
knock at my door. It was Waldemar. "Doctor," he said very quietly, "will you do me a favour? Lend me your little Venus altar--only for a few days, only till the day after to-morrow. I want to copy the design of it for the pedestal of my statue: it is appropriate." I sent the altar to him: the lad who carried it told me that Waldemar had set it up in the studio, and calling for a flask of wine, poured out two glasses. One he had given to my messenger for his pains; of the other he had drunk a mouthful, and thrown the rest over the altar, saying some unknown words. "It must be some German habit," said my servant. What odd fancies this man has!
July 25.
You ask me, dearest Excellency, to send you some sheets of my book: you
want to know what I have discovered. Alas! dear Donna Evelina, I have
discovered, I fear, that there is nothing to discover; that Apollo was
never in Styria; that Chaucer, when he called the Queen of the Fairies
Proserpine, meant nothing more than an eighteenth century poet when he
called Dolly or Betty Cynthia or Amaryllis; that the lady who damned poor
Tannhäuser was not Venus, but a mere little Suabian mountain sprite;
in fact, that poetry is only the invention of poets, and that that rogue,
Heinrich Heine, is entirely responsible for the existence of
Dieux en Exil.... My poor manuscript
can only tell you what St. Augustine, Tertullian, and sundry morose old Bishops thought about the loves of Father Zeus and the miracles of the Lady Isis, none of which is much worth your attention.... Reality, my dear Lady Evelyn, is always prosaic: at least when investigated into by bald old gentlemen like me.
And yet, it does not look so. The world, at times, seems to be playing
at being poetic, mysterious, full of wonder and romance. I am writing, as
usual, by my window, the moonlight brighter in its whiteness than my mean
little yellow-shining lamp. From the mysterious greyness, the olive groves
and lanes beneath my terrace, rises a confused quaver of frogs, and buzz
and whirr of insects: something, in sound, like the vague trails of
countless stars, the galaxies on galaxies blurred into mere blue shimmer by
the moon, which rides slowly across the highest heaven. The olive twigs
glisten in the rays: the flowers of the pomegranate and oleander are only
veiled as with bluish mist in their scarlet and rose. In the sea is another
sea, of molten, rippled silver, or a magic causeway leading to the shining
vague offing, the luminous pale sky-line, where the islands of Palmaria and
Tino float like unsubstantial, shadowy dolphins. The roofs of Montemirto
glimmer among the black, pointing cypresses: farther below, at the end of
that half-moon of land, is San Massimo: the Genoese fort inhabited by our
friends is profiled
black against the sky. All is dark: our fisher-folk go to bed early; Gertrude and the little ones are asleep: they at least are, for I can imagine Gertrude lying awake, the moonbeams on her thin Madonna face, smiling as she thinks of the little ones around her, of the other tiny thing that will soon lie on her breast.... There is a light in the old desecrated chapel, the thing that was once the temple of Venus, they say, and is now Waldemar's workshop, its broken roof mended with reeds and thatch. Waldemar has stolen in, no doubt to see his statue again. But he will return, more peaceful for the peacefulness of the night, to his sleeping wife and children. God bless and watch over them! Good-night, dearest Excellency.
July 26.
I have your Excellency's telegram in answer to mine. Many thanks
for sending the Prince. I await his coming with feverish longing; it is
still something to look forward to. All does not seem over. And yet what
can he do?
The children are safe: we fetched them out of their bed and brought them
up here. They are still a little shaken by the fire, the bustle, and by
finding themselves in a strange house; also, they want to know where their
mother is; but they have found a tame cat, and I hear them chirping on the
stairs.
It was only the roof of the studio, the reeds and thatch, that burned,
and a few old pieces of timber. Waldemar must have set fire to it with
great care; he had brought armfuls of faggots of dry myrtle and heather
from the bakehouse close by, and thrown into the blaze quantities of
pine-cones, and of some resin, I know not what, that smelt like incense.
When we made our way, early this morning, through the smouldering studio,
we were stifled with a hot church-like perfume: my brain swam, and I
suddenly remembered going into St. Peter's on Easter Day as a
child.
It happened last night, while I was writing to you. Gertrude had gone to
bed, leaving her husband in the studio. About eleven the maids heard him
come out and call to Dionea to get up and come and sit to him. He had had
this craze once before, of seeing her and his statue by an artificial
light: you remember he had theories about the way in which the ancients lit
up the statues in their temples. Gertrude, the servants say, was heard
creeping downstairs a little later.
Do you see it? I have seen nothing else these hours, which have seemed
weeks and months. He had placed Dionea on the big marble block behind the
altar, a great curtain of dull red brocade--you know that Venetian
brocade with the gold pomegranate pattern--behind her, like a Madonna
of Van Eyck's. He showed her to me once before like this, the
whiteness of her neck and breast, the
whiteness of the drapery round her flanks, toned to the colour of old marble by the light of the resin burning in pans all round.... Before Dionea was the altar--the altar of Venus which he had borrowed from me. He must have collected all the roses about it, and thrown the incense upon the embers when Gertrude suddenly entered. And then, and then ...
We found her lying across the altar, her pale hair among the ashes of
the incense, her blood--she had but little to give, poor white
ghost!--trickling among the carved garlands and rams' heads,
blackening the heaped-up roses. The body of Waldemar was found at the foot
of the castle cliff. Had he hoped, by setting the place on fire, to bury
himself among its ruins, or had he not rather wished to complete in this
way the sacrifice, to make the whole temple an immense votive pyre? It
looked like one, as we hurried down the hills to San Massimo: the whole
hillside, dry grass, myrtle, and heather, all burning, the pale short
flames waving against the blue moonlit sky, and the old fortress outlined
black against the blaze.
August 30.
Of Dionea I can tell you nothing certain. We speak of her as little as
we can. Some say they have seen her, on stormy nights, wandering among the
cliffs: but a sailor-boy assures me, by all the holy things, that the day
after the burning of the
Castle Chapel--we never call it anything else--he met at dawn, off the island of Palmaria, beyond the Strait of Porto Venere, a Greek boat, with eyes painted on the prow, going full sail to sea, the men singing as she went. And against the mast, a robe of purple and gold about her, and a myrtle-wreath on her head, leaned Dionea, singing words in an unknown tongue, the white pigeons circling around her.
To COUNT PETER BOUTOURLINE, AT TAGANTCHA, GOVERNNMENT OF
KIEW, RUSSIA.
MY DEAR BOUTOURLINE,--Do you remember my telling you, one
afternoon that you sat upon the hearthstool at Florence, the story of Mrs.
Oke of Okehurst?
You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of fantastic things, and
urged me to write it out at once, although I protested that, in such
matters, to write is to exorcise, to dispel the charm; and that
printers' ink chases away the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as
efficaciously as gallons of holy water.
But if, as I suspect, you will now put down any charm that story may
have possessed to the way in which we had been working ourselves up, that
firelight evening, with all manner of fantastic stuff--if, as I fear,
the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst will strike you as stale and
unprofitable--the sight of this little book will serve at least
to remind you, in the middle of your Russian summer, that there is such a season as winter, such a place as Florence, and such a person as your friend,
VERNON LEE.
KENSINGTON, July 1886.
altogether a question of movement. Look at the strange cheeks, hollow and rather flat; well, when she smiled she had the most marvellous dimples here. There was something exquisite and uncanny about it. Yes; I began the picture, but it was never finished. I did the husband first. I wonder who has his likeness now? Help me to move these pictures away from the wall. Thanks. This is her portrait; a huge wreck. I don't suppose you can make much of it; it is merely blocked in, and seems quite mad. You see my idea was to make her leaning against a wall--there was one hung with yellow that seemed almost brown--so as to bring out the silhouette.
It was very singular I should have chosen that particular wall. It does
look rather insane in this condition, but I like it; it has something of
her. I would frame it and hang it up, only people would ask questions. Yes;
you have guessed quite right--it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst. I forgot you
had relations in that part of the country; besides, I suppose the
newspapers were full of it at the time. You didn't know that it all
took place under my eyes? I can scarcely believe now that it did: it all
seems so distant, vivid but unreal, like a thing of my own invention. It
really was much stranger than any one guessed. People could no more
understand it than they could understand her. I doubt whether any one ever
understood Alice Oke besides myself. You mustn't think me
unfeeling. She was a marvellous, weird, exquisite creature, but one couldn't feel sorry for her. I felt much sorrier for the wretched creature of a husband. It seemed such an appropriate end for her; I fancy she would have liked it could she have known. Ah! I shall never have another chance of painting such a portrait as I wanted. She seemed sent me from heaven or the other place. You have never heard the story in detail? Well, I don't usually mention it, because people are so brutally stupid or sentimental; but I'll tell it you. Let me see. It's too dark to paint any more to-day, so I can tell it you now. Wait; I must turn her face to the wall. Ah, she was a marvellous creature!
the Park, and absolutely uninteresting from the crown of his head to the tip of his boots. Mr. Oke, who had been a lieutenant in the Blues before his marriage, was evidently extremely uncomfortable on finding himself in a studio. He felt misgivings about a man who could wear a velvet coat in town, but at the same time he was nervously anxious not to treat me in the very least like a tradesman. He walked round my place, looked at everything with the most scrupulous attention, stammered out a few complimentary phrases, and then, looking at his friend for assistance, tried to come to the point, but failed. The point, which the friend kindly explained, was that Mr. Oke was desirous to know whether my engagements would allow of my painting him and his wife, and what my terms would be. The poor man blushed perfectly crimson during this explanation, as if he had come with the most improper proposal; and I noticed--the only interesting thing about him--a very odd nervous frown between his eyebrows, a perfect double gash,--a thing which usually means something abnormal: a mad-doctor of my acquaintance calls it the maniac-frown. When I had answered, he suddenly burst out into rather confused explanations: his wife--Mrs. Oke--had seen some of my--pictures--paintings--portraits--at the--the--what d'you call it?--Academy. She had--in short, they had made a very great impression upon her. Mrs. Oke had a great taste for
art; she was, in short, extremely desirous of having her portrait and his painted by me, etcetera.
"My wife," he suddenly added, "is a remarkable woman.
I don't know whether you will think her handsome,--she isn't
exactly, you know. But she's awfully strange," and Mr. Oke of
Okehurst gave a little sigh and frowned that curious frown, as if so long a
speech and so decided an expression of opinion had cost him a great
deal.
It was a rather unfortunate moment in my career. A very influential
sitter of mine--you remember the fat lady with the crimson curtain
behind her?--had come to the conclusion or been persuaded that I had
painted her old and vulgar, which, in fact, she was. Her whole clique had
turned against me, the newspapers had taken up the matter, and for the
moment I was considered as a painter to whose brushes no woman would trust
her reputation. Things were going badly. So I snapped but too gladly at Mr.
Oke's offer, and settled to go down to Okehurst at the end of a
fortnight. But the door had scarcely closed upon my future sitter when I
began to regret my rashness; and my disgust at the thought of wasting a
whole summer upon the portrait of a totally uninteresting Kentish squire,
and his doubtless equally uninteresting wife, grew greater and greater as
the time for execution approached. I remember so well the frightful temper
in which I got into the train for Kent, and the even more
frightful temper in which I got out of it at the little station nearest to Okehurst. It was pouring floods. I felt a comfortable fury at the thought that my canvases would get nicely wetted before Mr. Oke's coachman had packed them on the top of the waggonette. It was just what served me right for coming to this confounded place to paint these confounded people. We drove off in the steady downpour. The roads were a mass of yellow mud; the endless flat grazing-grounds under the oak-trees, after having been burnt to cinders in a long drought, were turned into a hideous brown sop; the country seemed intolerably monotonous.
My spirits sank lower and lower. I began to meditate upon the modern
Gothic country-house, with the usual amount of Morris furniture, Liberty
rugs, and Mudie novels, to which I was doubtless being taken. My fancy
pictured very vividly the five or six little Okes--that man certainly
must have at least five children--the aunts, and sisters-in-law, and
cousins; the eternal routine of afternoon tea and lawn-tennis; above all,
it pictured Mrs. Oke, the bouncing, well-informed, model house-keeper,
electioneering, charity-organising young lady, whom such an individual as
Mr. Oke would regard in the light of a remarkable woman. And my spirit sank
within me, and I cursed my avarice in accepting the commission, my
spiritlessness in not throwing it over while yet there was time. We had
meanwhile driven into a large
park, or rather a long succession of grazing-grounds, dotted about with large oaks, under which the sheep were huddled together for shelter from the rain. In the distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a line of low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill. It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and there was none to be seen in the distance--nothing but the undulation of sere grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose, from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating. At last the road made a sudden bend, and disclosed what was evidently the home of my sitter. It was not what I had expected. In a dip in the ground a large red-brick house, with the rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the time of James I.,--a forlorn, vast place, set in the midst of the pasture-land, with no trace of garden before it, and only a few large trees indicating the possibility of one to the back; no lawn either, but on the other side of the sandy dip, which suggested a filled-up moat, a huge oak, short, hollow, with wreathing, blasted, black branches, upon which only a handful of leaves shook in the rain. It was not at all what I had pictured to myself the home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst.
My host received me in the hall, a large place, panelled and carved,
hung round with portraits up to its curious ceiling--vaulted and
ribbed like the inside of a ship's hull. He looked even more
blond and pink and white, more absolutely mediocre in his tweed suit; and also, I thought, even more good-natured and duller. He took me into his study, a room hung round with whips and fishing-tackle in place of books, while my things were being carried upstairs. It was very damp, and a fire was smouldering. He gave the embers a nervous kick with his foot, and said, as he offered me a cigar--
"You must excuse my not introducing you at once to Mrs. Oke. My
wife--in short, I believe my wife is asleep."
"Is Mrs. Oke unwell?" I asked, a sudden hope flashing across
me that I might be off the whole matter.
"Oh no! Alice is quite well; at least, quite as well as she
usually is. My wife," he added, after a minute, and in a very decided
tone, "does not enjoy very good health--a nervous constitution.
Oh no! not at all ill, nothing at all serious, you know. Only nervous, the
doctors say; mustn't be worried or excited, the doctors say; requires
lots of repose,--that sort of thing."
There was a dead pause. This man depressed me, I knew not why. He had a
listless, puzzled look, very much out of keeping with his evident admirable
health and strength.
"I suppose you are a great sportsman?" I asked from sheer
despair, nodding in the direction of the whips and guns and
fishing-rods.
"Oh no! not now. I was once. I have given up all that," he
answered, standing with his back to the fire, and staring at the polar bear
beneath his feet. "I--I have no time for all that now," he
added, as if an explanation were due. "A married man--you know.
Would you like to come up to your rooms?" he suddenly interrupted
himself. "I have had one arranged for you to paint in. My wife said
you would prefer a north light. If that one doesn't suit, you can have
your choice of any other."
I followed him out of the study, through the vast entrance-hall. In less
than a minute I was no longer thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Oke and the boredom
of doing their likeness; I was simply overcome by the beauty of this house,
which I had pictured modern and philistine. It was, without exception, the
most perfect example of an old English manor-house that I had ever seen;
the most magnificent intrinsically, and the most admirably preserved. Out
of the huge hall, with its immense fireplace of delicately carved and
inlaid grey and black stone, and its rows of family portraits, reaching
from the wainscoting to the oaken ceiling, vaulted and ribbed like a
ship's hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet
surmounted at intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak
carvings of coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted
a faded red and blue, and picked out with tarnished
gold, which harmonised with the tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. The beautifully damascened suits of court armour looked, without being at all rusty, as if no modern hand had ever touched them; the very rugs under foot were of sixteenth-century Persian make; the only things of to-day were the big bunches of flowers and ferns, arranged in majolica dishes upon the landings. Everything was perfectly silent; only from below came the chimes, silvery like an Italian palace fountain, of an old-fashioned clock.
It seemed to me that I was being led through the palace of the Sleeping
Beauty.
"What a magnificent house!" I exclaimed as I followed my
host through a long corridor, also hung with leather, wainscoted with
carvings, and furnished with big wedding coffers, and chairs that looked as
if they came out of some Vandyck portrait. In my mind was the strong
impression that all this was natural, spontaneous--that it had about
it nothing of the picturesqueness which swell studios have taught to rich
and æsthetic houses. Mr. Oke misunderstood me.
"It is a nice old place," he said, "but it's too
large for us. You see, my wife's health does not allow of our having
many guests; and there are no children."
I thought I noticed a vague complaint in his voice; and he evidently was
afraid there might
have seemed something of the kind, for he added immediately--
"I don't care for children one jackstraw, you know, myself;
can't understand how any one can, for my part."
If ever a man went out of his way to tell a lie, I said to myself, Mr.
Oke of Okehurst was doing so at the present moment.
When he had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted
to me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the
extraordinary imaginative impression which this house had given me.
I am very susceptible to such impressions; and besides the sort of spasm
of imaginative interest sometimes given to me by certain rare and eccentric
personalities, I know nothing more subduing than the charm, quieter and
less analytic, of any sort of complete and out-of-the-common-run sort of
house. To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of
the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the
great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers
reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework,
a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the
hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every
now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled the
room;--to do this is a special kind of
voluptuousness, peculiar and complex and indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, and which, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire.
After I had dressed for dinner I resumed my place in the arm-chair, and
resumed also my reverie, letting all these impressions of the
past--which seemed faded like the figures in the arras, but still warm
like the embers in the fire-place, still sweet and subtle like the perfume
of the dead rose-leaves and broken spices in the china bowls--permeate
me and go to my head. Of Oke and Oke's wife I did not think; I seemed
quite alone, isolated from the world, separated from it in this exotic
enjoyment.
Gradually the embers grew paler; the figures in the tapestry more
shadowy; the columned and curtained bed loomed out vaguer; the room seemed
to fill with greyness; and my eyes wandered to the mullioned bow-window,
beyond whose panes, between whose heavy stone-work, stretched a
greyish-brown expanse of sere and sodden park grass, dotted with big oaks;
while far off, behind a jagged fringe of dark Scotch firs, the wet sky was
suffused with the blood-red of the sunset. Between the falling of the
raindrops from the ivy outside, there came, fainter or sharper, the
recurring bleating of the lambs separated from their mothers, a forlorn,
quavering, eerie little cry.
I started up at a sudden rap at my door.
"Haven't you heard the gong for dinner?" asked Mr.
Oke's voice.
I had completely forgotten his existence.
This much is certain, that I must have been immeasurably surprised at
finding my hostess and future sitter so completely unlike everything I had
anticipated. Or no--now I come to think of it, I scarcely felt
surprised at all; or if I did, that shock of surprise could have lasted but
an infinitesimal part of a minute. The fact is, that, having once seen
Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one
could have fancied her at all different: there was something so complete,
so completely unlike every one else,
in her personality, that she seemed always to have been present in one's consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma.
Let me try and give you some notion of her: not that first impression,
whatever it may have been, but the absolute reality of her as I gradually
learned to see it. To begin with, I must repeat and reiterate over and over
again, that she was, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and exquisite
woman I have ever seen, but with a grace and an exquisiteness that had
nothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of what
goes by these names: grace and exquisiteness recognised at once as perfect,
but which were seen in her for the first, and probably, I do believe, for
the last time. It is conceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand years
there may arise a combination of lines, a system of movements, an outline,
a gesture, which is new, unprecedented, and yet hits off exactly our
desires for beauty and rareness? She was very tall; and I suppose people
would have called her thin. I don't know, for I never thought about
her as a body--bones, flesh, that sort of thing; but merely as a
wonderful series of lines, and a wonderful strangeness of personality. Tall
and slender, certainly, and with not one item of what makes up our notion
of a well-built woman. She was as straight--I mean she had as little
of what people call figure--as a bamboo; her shoulders
were a trifle high, and she had a decided stoop; her arms and her shoulders she never once wore uncovered. But this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness and a stateliness, a play of outline with every step she took, that I can't compare to anything else; there was in it something of the peacock and something also of the stag; but, above all, it was her own. I wish I could describe her. I wish, alas!--I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundred thousand times--I could paint her, as I see her now, if I shut my eyes--even if it were only a silhouette. There! I see her so plainly, walking slowly up and down a room, the slight highness of her shoulders just completing the exquisite arrangement of lines made by the straight supple back, the long exquisite neck, the head, with the hair cropped in short pale curls, always drooping a little, except when she would suddenly throw it back, and smile, not at me, nor at any one, nor at anything that had been said, but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something, with the strange dimple in her thin, pale cheeks, and the strange whiteness in her full, wide-opened eyes: the moment when she had something of the stag in her movement. But where is the use of talking about her? I don't believe, you know, that even the greatest painter can show what is the real beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary sense: Titian's and Tintoretto's women must have been miles handsomer than they have made them.
Something--and that the very essence--always escapes, perhaps because real beauty is as much a thing in time--a thing like music, a succession, a series--as in space. Mind you, I am speaking of a woman beautiful in the conventional sense. Imagine, then, how much more so in the case of a woman like Alice Oke; and if the pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint, can't succeed, how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion with mere wretched words--words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning, an impotent conventional association? To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke of Okehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite and strange,--an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than you could bring home the perfume of some newly discovered tropical flower by comparing it with the scent of a cabbage-rose or a lily.
That first dinner was gloomy enough. Mr. Oke--Oke of Okehurst, as
the people down there called him--was horribly shy, consumed with a
fear of making a fool of himself before me and his wife, I then thought.
But that sort of shyness did not wear off; and I soon discovered that,
although it was doubtless increased by the presence of a total stranger, it
was inspired in Oke, not by me, but by his wife. He would look every now
and then as if he were going to make a remark, and then evidently restrain
himself, and remain silent. It
was very curious to see this big, handsome, manly young fellow, who ought to have had any amount of success with women, suddenly stammer and grow crimson in the presence of his own wife. Nor was it the consciousness of stupidity; for when you got him alone, Oke, although always slow and timid, had a certain amount of ideas, and very defined political and social views, and a certain childlike earnestness and desire to attain certainty and truth which was rather touching. On the other hand, Oke's singular shyness was not, so far as I could see, the result of any kind of bullying on his wife's part. You can always detect, if you have any observation, the husband or the wife who is accustomed to be snubbed, to be corrected, by his or her better-half: there is a self-consciousness in both parties, a habit of watching and fault-finding, of being watched and found fault with. This was clearly not the case at Okehurst. Mrs. Oke evidently did not trouble herself about her husband in the very least; he might say or do any amount of silly things without rebuke or even notice; and he might have done so, had he chosen, ever since his wedding-day. You felt that at once. Mrs. Oke simply passed over his existence. I cannot say she paid much attention to any one's, even to mine. At first I thought it an affectation on her part--for there was something far-fetched in her whole appearance, something suggesting study, which might lead one to
tax her with affectation at first; she was dressed in a strange way, not according to any established æsthetic eccentricity, but individually, strangely, as if in the clothes of an ancestress of the seventeenth century. Well, at first I thought it a kind of pose on her part, this mixture of extreme graciousness and utter indifference which she manifested towards me. She always seemed to be thinking of something else; and although she talked quite sufficiently, and with every sign of superior intelligence, she left the impression of having been as taciturn as her husband.
In the beginning, in the first few days of my stay at Okehurst, I
imagined that Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort of flirt; and that her
absent manner, her look, while speaking to you, into an invisible distance,
her curious irrelevant smile, were so many means of attracting and baffling
adoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners of certain foreign
women--it is beyond English ones--which mean, to those who can
understand, "pay court to me." But I soon found I was mistaken.
Mrs. Oke had not the faintest desire that I should pay court to her; indeed
she did not honour me with sufficient thought for that; and I, on my part,
began to be too much interested in her from another point of view to dream
of such a thing. I became aware, not merely that I had before me the most
marvellously rare and exquisite and baffling
sub-
ject for a portrait, but also one of the most peculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that I look back upon it, I am tempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might be summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself--a Narcissus attitude--curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort of morbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristic save a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, to surprise and shock more particularly her husband, and thus be revenged for the intense boredom which his want of appreciation inflicted upon her.
I got to understand this much little by little, yet I did not seem to
have really penetrated the something mysterious about Mrs. Oke. There was a
waywardness, a strangeness, which I felt but could not explain--a
something as difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward
appearance, and perhaps very closely connected therewith. I became
interested in Mrs. Oke as if I had been in love with her; and I was not in
the least in love. I neither dreaded parting from her, nor felt any
pleasure in her presence. I had not the smallest wish to please or to gain
her notice. But I had her on the brain. I pursued her, her physical image,
her psychological explanation, with a kind of passion which filled my days,
and prevented my ever feeling dull. The Okes lived a remarkably solitary
life. There were but few
neighbours, of whom they saw but little; and they rarely had a guest in the house. Oke himself seemed every now and then seized with a sense of responsibility towards me. He would remark vaguely, during our walks and after-dinner chats, that I must find life at Okehurst horribly dull; his wife's health had accustomed him to solitude, and then also his wife thought the neighbours a bore. He never questioned his wife's judgment in these matters. He merely stated the case as if resignation were quite simple and inevitable; yet it seemed to me, sometimes, that this monotonous life of solitude, by the side of a woman who took no more heed of him than of a table or chair, was producing a vague depression and irritation in this young man, so evidently cut out for a cheerful, commonplace life. I often wondered how he could endure it at all, not having, as I had, the interest of a strange psychological riddle to solve, and of a great portrait to paint. He was, I found, extremely good,--the type of the perfectly conscientious young Englishman, the sort of man who ought to have been the Christian soldier kind of thing; devout, pure-minded, brave, incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually dense, and puzzled by all manner of moral scruples. The condition of his tenants and of his political party--he was a regular Kentish Tory--lay heavy on his mind. He spent hours every day in his study, doing the work of a land agent and a politi-
cal whip, reading piles of reports and newspapers and agricultural treatises; and emerging for lunch with piles of letters in his hand, and that odd puzzled look in his good healthy face, that deep gash between his eyebrows, which my friend the mad-doctor calls the maniac-frown. It was with this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but I felt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him to represent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blond conventionality. I was perhaps rather unconscientious about the likeness of Mr. Oke; I felt satisfied to paint it no matter how, I mean as regards character, for my whole mind was swallowed up in thinking how I should paint Mrs. Oke, how I could best transport on to canvas that singular and enigmatic personality. I began with her husband, and told her frankly that I must have much longer to study her. Mr. Oke couldn't understand why it should be necessary to make a hundred and one pencil-sketches of his wife before even determining in what attitude to paint her; but I think he was rather pleased to have an opportunity of keeping me at Okehurst; my presence evidently broke the monotony of his life. Mrs. Oke seemed perfectly indifferent to my staying, as she was perfectly indifferent to my presence. Without being rude, I never saw a woman pay so little attention to a guest; she would talk with me sometimes by the hour, or rather let me talk
to her, but she never seemed to be listening. She would lie back in a big seventeenth-century arm-chair while I played the piano, with that strange smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that strange whiteness in her eyes; but it seemed a matter of indifference whether my music stopped or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not take, or pretend to take, the very faintest interest; but that was nothing to me. I did not want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely wished to go on studying her.
The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my
presence as distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that
lay in the porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who was
occasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there a
week--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular
resemblance that existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that
hung in the hall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in
question was a full length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done
by some stray Italian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a rather
dark corner, facing the portrait, evidently painted to be its companion, of
a dark man, with a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution and
efficiency, in a black Vandyck dress. The two were evidently man and wife;
and in the corner of the woman's portrait were the words,
"Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, Esq., and wife to Nicholas Oke of Okehurst," and the date 1626--"Nicholas Oke" being the name painted in the corner of the small portrait. The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, at least so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days of Charles I. can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There were the same strange lines of figure and face, the same dimples in the thin cheeks, the same wide-opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity of expression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventional manner of the time. One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, the same beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as her descendant; for I found that Mr. and Mrs. Oke, who were first cousins, were both descended from that Nicholas Oke and that Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret. But the resemblance was heightened by the fact that, as I soon saw, the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like her ancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-century look; nay, that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait.
"You think I am like her," answered Mrs. Oke dreamily to my
remark, and her eyes wandered off to that unseen something, and the faint
smile dimpled her thin cheeks.
"You are like her, and you know it. I may
even say you wish to be like her, Mrs. Oke," I answered, laughing.
"Perhaps I do."
And she looked in the direction of her husband. I noticed that he had an
expression of distinct annoyance besides that frown of his.
"Isn't it true that Mrs. Oke tries to look like that
portrait?" I asked, with a perverse curiosity.
"Oh, fudge!" he exclaimed, rising from his chair and walking
nervously to the window. "It's all nonsense, mere nonsense. I
wish you wouldn't, Alice."
"Wouldn't what?" asked Mrs. Oke, with a sort of
contemptuous indifference. "If I am like that Alice Oke, why I am;
and I am very pleased any one should think so. She and her husband are just
about the only two members of our family--our most flat, stale, and
unprofitable family--that ever were in the least degree
interesting."
Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain.
"I don't see why you should abuse our family, Alice,"
he said. "Thank God, our people have always been honourable and
upright men and women!"
"Excepting always Nicholas Oke and Alice his wife, daughter of
Virgil Pomfret, Esq.," she answered, laughing, as he strode out into
the park.
"How childish he is!" she exclaimed when we were alone.
"He really minds, really feels disgraced by what our ancestors did
two centuries
and a half ago. I do believe William would have those two portraits taken down and burned if he weren't afraid of me and ashamed of the neighbours. And as it is, these two people really are the only two members of our family that ever were in the least interesting. I will tell you the story some day."
As it was, the story was told to me by Oke himself. The next day, as we
were taking our morning walk, he suddenly broke a long silence, laying
about him all the time at the sere grasses with the hooked stick that he
carried, like the conscientious Kentishman he was, for the purpose of
cutting down his and other folk's thistles.
"I fear you must have thought me very ill-mannered towards my wife
yesterday," he said shyly; "and indeed I know I was."
Oke was one of those chivalrous beings to whom every woman, every
wife--and his own most of all--appeared in the light of something
holy. "But--but--I have a prejudice which my wife does not
enter into, about raking up ugly things in one's own family. I suppose
Alice thinks that it is so long ago that it has really got no connection
with us; she thinks of it merely as a picturesque story. I daresay many
people feel like that; in short, I am sure they do, otherwise there
wouldn't be such lots of discreditable family traditions afloat. But I
feel as if it were all one whether it was long ago or not; when it's a
question of one's own people, I would rather have
it forgotten. I can't understand how people can talk about murders in their families, and ghosts, and so forth."
"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The
place seemed as if it required some to complete it.
"I hope not," answered Oke gravely.
His gravity made me smile.
"Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked.
"If there are such things as ghosts," he replied, "I
don't think they should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to
be, except as a warning or a punishment."
We walked on some time in silence, I wondering at the strange type of
this commonplace young man, and half wishing I could put something into my
portrait that should be the equivalent of this curious unimaginative
earnestness. Then Oke told me the story of those two pictures--told it
me about as badly and hesitatingly as was possible for mortal man.
He and his wife were, as I have said, cousins, and therefore descended
from the same old Kentish stock. The Okes of Okehurst could trace back to
Norman, almost to Saxon times, far longer than any of the titled or
better-known families of the neighbourhood. I saw that William Oke, in his
heart, thoroughly looked down upon all his neighbours. "We have never
done anything particular,
or been anything particular--never held any office," he said; "but we have always been here, and apparently always done our duty. An ancestor of ours was killed in the Scotch wars, another at Agincourt--mere honest captains." Well, early in the seventeenth century, the family had dwindled to a single member, Nicholas Oke, the same who had rebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas appears to have been somewhat different from the usual run of the family. He had, in his youth, sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have been less of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer very young, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from a neighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret," my host informed me, "and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite different sort of people--restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite of Henry VIII." It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having any Pomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an evident family dislike--the dislike of an Oke, one of the old, honourable, modest stock, which had quietly done its duty, for a family of fortune-seekers and Court minions. Well, there had come to live near Okehurst, in a little house recently inherited from an uncle, a certain Christopher Lovelock, a young gallant and poet, who was in momentary disgrace at Court for some
love affair. This Lovelock had struck up a great friendship with his neighbours of Okehurst--too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either for her husband's taste or her own. Anyhow, one evening as he was riding home alone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen, but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wife dressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition had remained. "They used to tell it us when we were children," said my host, in a hoarse voice, "and to frighten my cousin--I mean my wife--and me with stories about Lovelock. It is merely a tradition, which I hope may die out, as I sincerely pray to heaven that it may be false." "Alice--Mrs. Oke--you see," he went on after some time, "doesn't feel about it as I do. Perhaps I am morbid. But I do dislike having the old story raked up."
And we said no more on the subject.
guess that I was making mischief merely by chiming in, for the sake of the portrait I had undertaken, and of a very harmless psychological mania, with what was merely the fad, the little romantic affectation or eccentricity, of a scatter-brained and eccentric young woman? How in the world should I have dreamed that I was handling explosive substances? A man is surely not responsible if the people with whom he is forced to deal, and whom he deals with as with all the rest of the world, are quite different from all other human creatures.
So, if indeed I did at all conduce to mischief, I really cannot blame
myself. I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique subject for a
portrait-painter of my particular sort, and a most singular,
bizarre personality. I could not possibly do my subject
justice so long as I was kept at a distance, prevented from studying the
real character of the woman. I required to put her into play. And I ask you
whether any more innocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a
woman, and letting her talk, about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of
ancestors of hers of the time of Charles I., and a poet whom they had
murdered?--particularly as I studiously respected the prejudices of my
host, and refrained from mentioning the matter, and tried to restrain Mrs.
Oke from doing so, in the presence of William Oke himself.
I had certainly guessed correctly. To resemble
the Alice Oke of the year 1626 was the caprice, the mania, the pose, the whatever you may call it, of the Alice Oke of 1880; and to perceive this resemblance was the sure way of gaining her good graces. It was the most extraordinary craze, of all the extraordinary crazes of childless and idle women, that I had ever met; but it was more than that, it was admirably characteristic. It finished off the strange figure of Mrs. Oke, as I saw it in my imagination--this bizarre creature of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness--that she should have no interest in the present, but only an eccentric passion in the past. It seemed to give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes, to her irrelevant and far-off smile. It was like the words to a weird piece of gipsy music, this that she, who was so different, so distant from all women of her own time, should try and identify herself with a woman of the past--that she should have a kind of flirtation-- But of this anon.
I told Mrs. Oke that I had learnt from her husband the outline of the
tragedy, or mystery, whichever it was, of Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, and the poet Christopher Lovelock. That look of vague contempt, of
a desire to shock, which I had noticed before, came into her beautiful,
pale, diaphanous face.
"I suppose my husband was very shocked at the whole matter,"
she said--"told it you with as little detail as possible, and
assured you very
solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be a mere dreadful calumny? Poor Willie! I remember already when we were children, and I used to come with my mother to spend Christmas at Okehurst, and my cousin was down here for his holidays, how I used to horrify him by insisting upon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs, and playing the story of the wicked Mrs. Oke; and he always piously refused to do the part of Nicholas, when I wanted to have the scene on Cotes Common. I didn't know then that I was like the original Alice Oke; I found it out only after our marriage. You really think that I am?"
She certainly was, particularly at that moment, as she stood in a white
Vandyck dress, with the green of the park-land rising up behind her, and
the low sun catching her short locks and surrounding her head, her
exquisitely bowed head, with a pale-yellow halo. But I confess I thought
the original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though she might be, very
uninteresting compared with this wayward and exquisite creature whom I had
rashly promised myself to send down to posterity in all her unlikely
wayward exquisiteness.
One morning while Mr. Oke was despatching his Saturday heap of
Conservative manifestoes and rural decisions--he was justice of the
peace in a most literal sense, penetrating into cottages and huts,
defending the weak and admonishing the ill-conducted--one morning
while I was making
one of my many pencil-sketches (alas, they are all that remain to me now!) of my future sitter, Mrs. Oke gave me her version of the story of Alice Oke and Christopher Lovelock.
"Do you suppose there was anything between them?" I
asked--"that she was ever in love with him? How do you explain
the part which tradition ascribes to her in the supposed murder? One has
heard of women and their lovers who have killed the husband; but a woman
who combines with her husband to kill her lover, or at least the man who is
in love with her--that is surely very singular." I was absorbed
in my drawing, and really thinking very little of what I was saying.
"I don't know," she answered pensively, with that
distant look in her eyes. "Alice Oke was very proud, I am sure. She
may have loved the poet very much, and yet been indignant with him, hated
having to love him. She may have felt that she had a right to rid herself
of him, and to call upon her husband to help her to do so."
"Good heavens! what a fearful idea!" I exclaimed, half
laughing. "Don't you think, after all, that Mr. Oke may be right
in saying that it is easier and more comfortable to take the whole story as
a pure invention?"
"I cannot take it as an invention," answered Mrs. Oke
contemptuously, "because I happen to know that it is true."
"Indeed!" I answered, working away at my
sketch, and enjoying putting this strange creature, as I said to myself, through her paces; "how is that?"
"How does one know that anything is true in this world?" she
replied evasively; "because one does, because one feels it to be
true, I suppose."
And, with that far-off look in her light eyes, she relapsed into
silence.
"Have you ever read any of Lovelock's poetry?" she
asked me suddenly the next day.
"Lovelock?" I answered, for I had forgotten the name.
"Lovelock, who"-- But I stopped, remembering the
prejudices of my host, who was seated next to me at table.
"Lovelock who was killed by Mr. Oke's and my
ancestors."
And she looked full at her husband, as if in perverse enjoyment of the
evident annoyance which it caused him.
"Alice," he entreated in a low voice, his whole face
crimson, "for mercy's sake, don't talk about such things
before the servants."
Mrs. Oke burst into a high, light, rather hysterical laugh, the laugh of
a naughty child.
"The servants! Gracious heavens! do you suppose they haven't
heard the story? Why, it's as well known as Okehurst itself in the
neighbourhood. Don't they believe that Lovelock has been seen about
the house? Haven't they all heard
his footsteps in the big corridor? Haven't they, my dear Willie, noticed a thousand times that you never will stay a minute alone in the yellow drawing-room--that you run out of it, like a child, if I happen to leave you there for a minute?"
True! How was it I had not noticed that? or rather, that I only now
remembered having noticed it? The yellow drawing-room was one of the most
charming rooms in the house: a large, bright room, hung with yellow damask
and panelled with carvings, that opened straight out on to the lawn, far
superior to the room in which we habitually sat, which was comparatively
gloomy. This time Mr. Oke struck me as really too childish. I felt an
intense desire to badger him.
"The yellow drawing-room!" I exclaimed. "Does this
interesting literary character haunt the yellow drawing-room? Do tell me
about it. What happened there?"
Mr. Oke made a painful effort to laugh.
"Nothing ever happened there, so far as I know," he said,
and rose from the table.
"Really?" I asked incredulously.
"Nothing did happen there," answered Mrs. Oke slowly,
playing mechanically with a fork, and picking out the pattern of the
tablecloth. "That is just the extraordinary circumstance, that, so
far as any one knows, nothing ever did happen there; and yet that room has
an evil reputation. No member of our family, they say, can bear to sit
there alone for more than a minute. You see, William evidently cannot."
"Have you ever seen or heard anything strange there?" I
asked of my host.
He shook his head. "Nothing," he answered curtly, and lit
his cigar.
"I presume you have not," I asked, half laughing, of Mrs.
Oke, "since you don't mind sitting in that room for hours alone?
How do you explain this uncanny reputation, since nothing ever happened
there?"
"Perhaps something is destined to happen there in the
future," she answered, in her absent voice. And then she suddenly
added, "Suppose you paint my portrait in that room?"
Mr. Oke suddenly turned round. He was very white, and looked as if he
were going to say something, but desisted.
"Why do you worry Mr. Oke like that?" I asked, when he had
gone into his smoking-room with his usual bundle of papers. "It is
very cruel of you, Mrs. Oke. You ought to have more consideration for
people who believe in such things, although you may not be able to put
yourself in their frame of mind."
"Who tells you that I don't believe in such
things, as you call them?" she answered abruptly.
"Come," she said, after a minute, "I want to show you
why I believe in Christopher Lovelock. Come with me into the yellow
room."
sichord of exquisite curve and slenderness, with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In a recess was a shelf of old books, mainly English and Italian poets of the Elizabethan time; and close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, a large and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The panes of the mullioned window were open, and yet the air seemed heavy, with an indescribable heady perfume, not that of any growing flower, but like that of old stuff that should have lain for years among spices.
"It is a beautiful room!" I exclaimed. "I should
awfully like to paint you in it;" but I had scarcely spoken the words
when I felt I had done wrong. This woman's husband could not bear the
room, and it seemed to me vaguely as if he were right in detesting it.
Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the table
where she was standing sorting the papers.
"Look!" she said, "these are all poems by Christopher
Lovelock;" and touching the yellow papers with delicate and reverent
fingers, she commenced reading some of them out loud in a slow,
half-audible voice. They were songs in the style of those of Herrick,
Waller, and Drayton, complaining for the most part of the cruelty of a lady
called Dryope, in whose name was evidently concealed a reference to that of
the mistress of Okehurst. The songs were graceful, and not
with-
out a certain faded passion; but I was thinking not of them, but of the woman who was reading them to me.
Mrs. Oke was standing with the brownish yellow wall as a background to
her white brocade dress, which, in its stiff seventeenth-century make,
seemed but to bring out more clearly the slightness, the exquisite
suppleness, of her tall figure. She held the papers in one hand, and leaned
the other, as if for support, on the inlaid cabinet by her side. Her voice,
which was delicate, shadowy, like her person, had a curious throbbing
cadence, as if she were reading the words of a melody, and restraining
herself with difficulty from singing it; and as she read, her long slender
throat throbbed slightly, and a faint redness came into her thin face. She
evidently knew the verses by heart, and her eyes were mostly fixed with
that distant smile in them, with which harmonised a constant tremulous
little smile in her lips.
"That is how I would wish to paint her!" I exclaimed within
myself; and scarcely noticed, what struck me on thinking over the scene,
that this strange being read these verses as one might fancy a woman would
read love-verses addressed to herself.
"Those are all written for Alice Oke--Alice the daughter of
Virgil Pomfret," she said slowly, folding up the papers. "I
found them at the bottom of this cabinet. Can you doubt of the reality of
Christopher Lovelock now?"
The question was an illogical one, for to doubt of the existence of
Christopher Lovelock was one thing, and to doubt of the mode of his death
was another; but somehow I did feel convinced.
"Look!" she said, when she had replaced the poems, "I
will show you something else." Among the flowers that stood on the
upper storey of her writing-table--for I found that Mrs. Oke had a
writing-table in the yellow room--stood, as on an altar, a small black
carved frame, with a silk curtain drawn over it: the sort of thing behind
which you would have expected to find a head of Christ or of the Virgin
Mary. She drew the curtain and displayed a large-sized miniature,
representing a young man, with auburn curls and a peaked auburn beard,
dressed in black, but with lace about his neck, and large pear-shaped
pearls in his ears: a wistful, melancholy face. Mrs. Oke took the miniature
religiously off its stand, and showed me, written in faded characters upon
the back, the name "Christopher Lovelock," and the date
1626.
"I found this in the secret drawer of that cabinet, together with
the heap of poems," she said, taking the miniature out of my
hand.
I was silent for a minute.
"Does--does Mr. Oke know that you have got it here?" I
asked; and then wondered what in the world had impelled me to put such a
question.
Mrs. Oke smiled that smile of contemptuous
indifference. "I have never hidden it from any one. If my husband disliked my having it, he might have taken it away, I suppose. It belongs to him, since it was found in his house."
I did not answer, but walked mechanically towards the door. There was
something heady and oppressive in this beautiful room; something, I
thought, almost repulsive in this exquisite woman. She seemed to me,
suddenly, perverse and dangerous.
I scarcely know why, but I neglected Mrs. Oke that afternoon. I went to
Mr. Oke's study, and sat opposite to him smoking while he was
engrossed in his accounts, his reports, and electioneering papers. On the
table, above the heap of paper-bound volumes and pigeon-holed documents,
was, as sole ornament of his den, a little photograph of his wife, done
some years before. I don't know why, but as I sat and watched him,
with his florid, honest, manly beauty, working away conscientiously, with
that little perplexed frown of his, I felt intensely sorry for this
man.
But this feeling did not last. There was no help for it: Oke was not as
interesting as Mrs. Oke; and it required too great an effort to pump up
sympathy for this normal, excellent, exemplary young squire, in the
presence of so wonderful a creature as his wife. So I let myself go to the
habit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk over her strange craze, or rather
of drawing her
out about it. I confess that I derived a morbid and exquisite pleasure in doing so: it was so characteristic in her, so appropriate to the house! It completed her personality so perfectly, and made it so much easier to conceive a way of painting her. I made up my mind little by little, while working at William Oke's portrait (he proved a less easy subject than I had anticipated, and, despite his conscientious efforts, was a nervous, uncomfortable sitter, silent and brooding)--I made up my mind that I would paint Mrs. Oke standing by the cabinet in the yellow room, in the white Vandyck dress copied from the portrait of her ancestress. Mr. Oke might resent it, Mrs. Oke even might resent it; they might refuse to take the picture, to pay for it, to allow me to exhibit; they might force me to run my umbrella through the picture. No matter. That picture should be painted, if merely for the sake of having painted it; for I felt it was the only thing I could do, and that it would be far away my best work. I told neither of my resolution, but prepared sketch after sketch of Mrs. Oke, while continuing to paint her husband.
Mrs. Oke was a silent person, more silent even than her husband, for she
did not feel bound, as he did, to attempt to entertain a guest or to show
any interest in him. She seemed to spend her life--a curious,
inactive, half-invalidish life, broken
by sudden fits of childish cheerfulness--in an eternal day-dream, strolling about the house and grounds, arranging the quantities of flowers that always filled all the rooms, beginning to read and then throwing aside novels and books of poetry, of which she always had a large number; and, I believe, lying for hours, doing nothing, on a couch in that yellow drawing-room, which, with her sole exception, no member of the Oke family had ever been known to stay in alone. Little by little I began to suspect and to verify another eccentricity of this eccentric being, and to understand why there were stringent orders never to disturb her in that yellow room.
It had been a habit at Okehurst, as at one or two other English
manor-houses, to keep a certain amount of the clothes of each generation,
more particularly wedding-dresses. A certain carved oaken press, of which
Mr. Oke once displayed the contents to me, was a perfect museum of
costumes, male and female, from the early years of the seventeenth to the
end of the eighteenth century--a thing to take away the breath of a
bric-a-brac collector, an antiquary, or a
genre painter. Mr. Oke was none of these, and
therefore took but little interest in the collection, save in so far as it
interested his family feeling. Still he seemed well acquainted with the
contents of that press.
He was turning over the clothes for my benefit, when suddenly I noticed
that he frowned. I
know not what impelled me to say, "By the way, have you any dresses of that Mrs. Oke whom your wife resembles so much? Have you got that particular white dress she was painted in, perhaps?"
Oke of Okehurst flushed very red.
"We have it," he answered hesitatingly, "but--it
isn't here at present--I can't find it. I suppose," he
blurted out with an effort, "that Alice has got it. Mrs. Oke
sometimes has the fancy of having some of these old things down. I suppose
she takes ideas from them."
A sudden light dawned in my mind. The white dress in which I had seen
Mrs. Oke in the yellow room, the day that she showed me Lovelock's
verses, was not, as I had thought, a modern copy; it was the original dress
of Alice Oke, the daughter of Virgil Pomfret--the dress in which,
perhaps, Christopher Lovelock had seen her in that very room.
The idea gave me a delightful picturesque shudder. I said nothing. But I
pictured to myself Mrs. Oke sitting in that yellow room--that room
which no Oke of Okehurst save herself ventured to remain in alone, in the
dress of her ancestress, confronting, as it were, that vague, haunting
something that seemed to fill the place--that vague presence, it
seemed to me, of the murdered cavalier poet.
Mrs. Oke, as I have said, was extremely silent, as a result of being
extremely indifferent. She
really did not care in the least about anything except her own ideas and day-dreams, except when, every now and then, she was seized with a sudden desire to shock the prejudices or superstitions of her husband. Very soon she got into the way of never talking to me at all, save about Alice and Nicholas Oke and Christopher Lovelock; and then, when the fit seized her, she would go on by the hour, never asking herself whether I was or was not equally interested in the strange craze that fascinated her. It so happened that I was. I loved to listen to her, going on discussing by the hour the merits of Lovelock's poems, and analysing her feelings and those of her two ancestors. It was quite wonderful to watch the exquisite, exotic creature in one of these moods, with the distant look in her grey eyes and the absent-looking smile in her thin cheeks, talking as if she had intimately known these people of the seventeenth century, discussing every minute mood of theirs, detailing every scene between them and their victim, talking of Alice, and Nicholas, and Lovelock as she might of her most intimate friends. Of Alice particularly, and of Lovelock. She seemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that had crossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me, speaking of herself in the third person, of her own feelings--as if I were listening to a woman's confidences, the recital of her doubts, scruples, and agonies
about a living lover. For Mrs. Oke, who seemed the most self-absorbed of creatures in all other matters, and utterly incapable of understanding or sympathising with the feelings of other persons, entered completely and passionately into the feelings of this woman, this Alice, who, at some moments, seemed to be not another woman, but herself.
"But how could she do it--how could she kill the man she
cared for?" I once asked her.
"Because she loved him more than the whole world!" she
exclaimed, and rising suddenly from her chair, walked towards the window,
covering her face with her hands.
I could see, from the movement of her neck, that she was sobbing. She
did not turn round, but motioned me to go away.
"Don't let us talk any more about it," she said.
"I am ill to-day, and silly."
I closed the door gently behind me. What mystery was there in this
woman's life? This listlessness, this strange self-engrossment and
stranger mania about people long dead, this indifference and desire to
annoy towards her husband--did it all mean that Alice Oke had loved or
still loved some one who was not the master of Okehurst? And his
melancholy, his preoccupation, the something about him that told of a
broken youth--did it mean that he knew it?
William Oke was quite radiant.
"If only Alice were always well like this!" he exclaimed;
"if only she would take, or could take, an interest in life, how
different things would be! But," he added, as if fearful lest he
should be supposed to accuse her in any way, "how can she, usually,
with her wretched health? Still, it does make me awfully happy to see her
like this."
I nodded. But I cannot say that I really acquiesced in his views. It
seemed to me, particularly with the recollection of yesterday's
extraordinary scene, that Mrs. Oke's high spirits were anything but
normal. There was something in her unusual activity and still more unusual
cheerfulness that was merely nervous and feverish; and I had, the whole
day, the impression of dealing with a woman who was ill and who would very
speedily collapse.
Mrs. Oke spent her day wandering from one room to another, and from the
garden to the greenhouse, seeing whether all was in order, when, as a
matter of fact, all was always in order at Okehurst. She did not give me
any sitting, and not a word was spoken about Alice Oke or Christopher
Lovelock. Indeed, to a casual observer, it might have seemed as if all that
craze about Lovelock had completely departed, or never existed. About five
o'clock, as I was strolling among the red-brick round-gabled
outhouses--each with its armorial oak--and the old-fashioned
spalliered kitchen and fruit garden, I saw Mrs. Oke standing, her hands
full of York and Lancaster roses, upon the steps facing the stables. A
groom was currycombing a horse, and outside the coach-house was Mr.
Oke's little high-wheeled cart.
"Let us have a drive!" suddenly exclaimed Mrs. Oke, on
seeing me. "Look what a beautiful evening--and look at that dear
little cart! It is so long since I have driven, and I feel as if I must
drive again. Come with me. And you, harness Jim at once and come round to
the door."
I was quite amazed; and still more so when the cart drove up before the
door, and Mrs. Oke called to me to accompany her. She sent away the groom,
and in a minute we were rolling along, at a tremendous pace, along the
yellow-sand road, with the sere pasture-lands, the big oaks, on either
side.
I could scarcely believe my senses. This woman, in her mannish little
coat and hat, driving a powerful young horse with the utmost skill, and
chattering like a school-girl of sixteen, could not be the delicate,
morbid, exotic, hot-house creature, unable to walk or to do anything, who
spent her days lying about on couches in the heavy atmosphere, redolent
with strange scents and associations, of the yellow drawing-room. The
movement of the light carriage, the cool draught, the very grind of the
wheels upon the gravel, seemed to go to her head like wine.
"It is so long since I have done this sort of thing," she
kept repeating; "so long, so long. Oh, don't you think it
delightful, going at this pace, with the idea that any moment the horse may
come down and we two be killed?" and she laughed her childish laugh,
and turned her face, no longer pale, but flushed with the movement and the
excitement, towards me.
The cart rolled on quicker and quicker, one gate after another swinging
to behind us, as we flew up and down the little hills, across the pasture
lands, through the little red-brick gabled villages, where the people came
out to see us pass, past the rows of willows along the streams, and the
dark-green compact hop-fields, with the blue and hazy tree-tops of the
horizon getting bluer and more hazy as the yellow light began to graze the
ground. At last we got to an open space, a
high-lying piece of common-land, such as is rare in that ruthlessly utilised country of grazing-grounds and hop-gardens. Among the low hills of the Weald, it seemed quite preternaturally high up, giving a sense that its extent of flat heather and gorse, bound by distant firs, was really on the top of the world. The sun was setting just opposite, and its lights lay flat on the ground, staining it with the red and black of the heather, or rather turning it into the surface of a purple sea, canopied over by a bank of dark-purple clouds--the jet-like sparkle of the dry ling and gorse tipping the purple like sunlit wavelets. A cold wind swept in our faces.
"What is the name of this place?" I asked. It was the only
bit of impressive scenery that I had met in the neighbourhood of
Okehurst.
"It is called Cotes Common," answered Mrs. Oke, who had
slackened the pace of the horse, and let the reins hang loose about his
neck. "It was here that Christopher Lovelock was killed."
There was a moment's pause; and then she proceeded, tickling the
flies from the horse's ears with the end of her whip, and looking
straight into the sunset, which now rolled, a deep purple stream, across
the heath to our feet--
"Lovelock was riding home one summer evening from Appledore, when,
as he had got half-way across Cotes Common, somewhere about here--for
I have always heard them mention the pond in the old gravel-pits as about the place--he saw two men riding towards him, in whom he presently recognised Nicholas Oke of Okehurst accompanied by a groom. Oke of Okehurst hailed him; and Lovelock rode up to meet him. 'I am glad to have met you, Mr. Lovelock,' said Nicholas, 'because I have some important news for you;' and so saying, he brought his horse close to the one that Lovelock was riding, and suddenly turning round, fired off a pistol at his head. Lovelock had time to move, and the bullet, instead of striking him, went straight into the head of his horse, which fell beneath him. Lovelock, however, had fallen in such a way as to be able to extricate himself easily from his horse; and drawing his sword, he rushed upon Oke, and seized his horse by the bridle. Oke quickly jumped off and drew his sword; and in a minute, Lovelock, who was much the better swordsman of the two, was having the better of him. Lovelock had completely disarmed him, and got his sword at Oke's throat, crying out to him that if he would ask forgiveness he should be spared for the sake of their old friendship, when the groom suddenly rode up from behind and shot Lovelock through the back. Lovelock fell, and Oke immediately tried to finish him with his sword, while the groom drew up and held the bridle of Oke's horse. At that moment the sunlight fell upon the groom's face, and Love-
lock recognised Mrs. Oke. He cried out, 'Alice, Alice! it is you who have murdered me!' and died. Then Nicholas Oke sprang into his saddle and rode off with his wife, leaving Lovelock dead by the side of his fallen horse. Nicholas Oke had taken the precaution of removing Lovelock's purse and throwing it into the pond, so the murder was put down to certain highwaymen who were about in that part of the country. Alice Oke died many years afterwards, quite an old woman, in the reign of Charles II.; but Nicholas did not live very long, and shortly before his death got into a very strange condition, always brooding, and sometimes threatening to kill his wife. They say that in one of these fits, just shortly before his death, he told the whole story of the murder, and made a prophecy that when the head of his house and master of Okehurst should marry another Alice Oke, descended from himself and his wife, there should be an end of the Okes of Okehurst. You see, it seems to be coming true. We have no children, and I don't suppose we shall ever have any. I, at least, have never wished for them."
Mrs. Oke paused, and turned her face towards me with the absent smile in
her thin cheeks: her eyes no longer had that distant look; they were
strangely eager and fixed. I did not know what to answer; this woman
positively frightened me. We remained for a moment in that same place,
with the sunlight dying away in crimson ripples on the heather, gilding the yellow banks, the black waters of the pond, surrounded by thin rushes, and the yellow gravel-pits; while the wind blew in our faces and bent the ragged warped bluish tops of the firs. Then Mrs. Oke touched the horse, and off we went at a furious pace. We did not exchange a single word, I think, on the way home. Mrs. Oke sat with her eyes fixed on the reins, breaking the silence now and then only by a word to the horse, urging him to an even more furious pace. The people we met along the roads must have thought that the horse was running away, unless they noticed Mrs. Oke's calm manner and the look of excited enjoyment in her face. To me it seemed that I was in the hands of a mad-woman, and I quietly prepared myself for being upset or dashed against a cart. It had turned cold, and the draught was icy in our faces when we got within sight of the red gables and high chimney-stacks of Okehurst. Mr. Oke was standing before the door. On our approach I saw a look of relieved suspense, of keen pleasure come into his face.
He lifted his wife out of the cart in his strong arms with a kind of
chivalrous tenderness.
"I am so glad to have you back, darling," he
exclaimed--"so glad! I was delighted to hear you had gone out
with the cart, but as you have not driven for so long, I was beginning to
be
frightfully anxious, dearest. Where have you been all this time?"
Mrs. Oke had quickly extricated herself from her husband, who had
remained holding her, as one might hold a delicate child who has been
causing anxiety. The gentleness and affection of the poor fellow had
evidently not touched her--she seemed almost to recoil from it.
"I have taken him to Cotes Common," she said, with that
perverse look which I had noticed before, as she pulled off her
driving-gloves. "It is such a splendid old place."
Mr. Oke flushed as if he had bitten upon a sore tooth, and the double
gash painted itself scarlet between his eyebrows.
Outside, the mists were beginning to rise, veiling the park-land dotted
with big black oaks, and from which, in the watery moonlight, rose on all
sides the eerie little cry of the lambs separated from their mothers. It
was damp and cold, and I shivered.
The afternoon of the third day--they had come
for an electioneering ball, and stayed three nights--the weather changed; it turned suddenly very cold and began to pour. Every one was sent indoors, and there was a general gloom suddenly over the company. Mrs. Oke seemed to have got sick of her guests, and was listlessly lying back on a couch, paying not the slightest attention to the chattering and piano-strumming in the room, when one of the guests suddenly proposed that they should play charades. He was a distant cousin of the Okes, a sort of fashionable artistic Bohemian, swelled out to intolerable conceit by the amateur-actor vogue of a season.
"It would be lovely in this marvellous old place," he cried,
"just to dress up, and parade about, and feel as if we belonged to
the past. I have heard you have a marvellous collection of old costumes,
more or less ever since the days of Noah, somewhere, Cousin
Bill."
The whole party exclaimed in joy at this proposal. William Oke looked
puzzled for a moment, and glanced at his wife, who continued to lie
listless on her sofa.
"There is a press full of clothes belonging to the family,"
he answered dubiously, apparently overwhelmed by the desire to please his
guests; "but--but--I don't know whether it's
quite respectful to dress up in the clothes of dead people."
"Oh, fiddlestick!" cried the cousin. "What do the dead
people know about it? Besides," he
added, with mock seriousness, "I assure you we shall behave in the most reverent way and feel quite solemn about it all, if only you will give us the key, old man."
Again Mr. Oke looked towards his wife, and again met only her vague,
absent glance.
"Very well," he said, and led his guests upstairs.
An hour later the house was filled with the strangest crew and the
strangest noises. I had entered, to a certain extent, into William
Oke's feeling of unwillingness to let his ancestors' clothes and
personality be taken in vain; but when the masquerade was complete, I must
say that the effect was quite magnificent. A dozen youngish men and
women--those who were staying in the house and some neighbours who had
come for lawn-tennis and dinner--were rigged out, under the direction
of the theatrical cousin, in the contents of that oaken press: and I have
never seen a more beautiful sight than the panelled corridors, the carved
and escutcheoned staircase, the dim drawing-rooms with their faded
tapestries, the great hall with its vaulted and ribbed ceiling, dotted
about with groups or single figures that seemed to have come straight from
the past. Even William Oke, who, besides myself and a few elderly people,
was the only man not masqueraded, seemed delighted and fired by the sight.
A certain schoolboy character suddenly came out in him; and finding that
there was no costume left for him, he rushed upstairs and presently returned in the uniform he had worn before his marriage. I thought I had really never seen so magnificent a specimen of the handsome Englishman; he looked, despite all the modern associations of his costume, more genuinely old-world than all the rest, a knight for the Black Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular features and beautiful fair hair and complexion. After a minute, even the elderly people had got costumes of some sort--dominoes arranged at the moment, and hoods and all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery and Oriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become, so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement--with the childishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlying the majority even of well-bred English men and women--Mr. Oke himself doing the mountebank like a schoolboy at Christmas.
"Where is Mrs. Oke? Where is Alice?" some one suddenly
asked.
Mrs. Oke had vanished. I could fully understand that to this eccentric
being, with her fantastic, imaginative, morbid passion for the past, such a
carnival as this must be positively revolting; and, absolutely indifferent
as she was to giving offence, I could imagine how she would have retired,
disgusted and outraged, to dream her strange day-dreams in the yellow
room.
But a moment later, as we were all noisily preparing to go in to dinner,
the door opened and a strange figure entered, stranger than any of these
others who were profaning the clothes of the dead: a boy, slight and tall,
in a brown riding-coat, leathern belt, and big buff boots, a little grey
cloak over one shoulder, a large grey hat slouched over the eyes, a dagger
and pistol at the waist. It was Mrs. Oke, her eyes preternaturally bright,
and her whole face lit up with a bold, perverse smile.
Every one exclaimed, and stood aside. Then there was a moment's
silence, broken by faint applause. Even to a crew of noisy boys and girls
playing the fool in the garments of men and women long dead and buried,
there is something questionable in the sudden appearance of a young married
woman, the mistress of the house, in a riding-coat and jack-boots; and Mrs.
Oke's expression did not make the jest seem any the less
questionable.
"What is that costume?" asked the theatrical cousin, who,
after a second, had come to the conclusion that Mrs. Oke was merely a woman
of marvellous talent whom he must try and secure for his amateur troop next
season.
"It is the dress in which an ancestress of ours, my namesake Alice
Oke, used to go out riding with her husband in the days of Charles
I.," she answered, and took her seat at the head of the table.
Involuntarily my eyes sought those of Oke of Okehurst. He, who blushed as
easily as a girl
of sixteen, was now as white as ashes, and I noticed that he pressed his hand almost convulsively to his mouth.
"Don't you recognise my dress, William?" asked Mrs.
Oke, fixing her eyes upon him with a cruel smile.
He did not answer, and there was a moment's silence, which the
theatrical cousin had the happy thought of breaking by jumping upon his
seat and emptying off his glass with the exclamation--
"To the health of the two Alice Okes, of the past and the
present!"
Mrs. Oke nodded, and with an expression I had never seen in her face
before, answered in a loud and aggressive tone--
"To the health of the poet, Mr. Christopher Lovelock, if his ghost
be honouring this house with its presence!"
I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the
midst of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple,
and parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, and
clowns, with faces painted and corked and floured over, I seemed to see
that sanguine sunset, washing like a sea of blood over the heather, to
where, by the black pond and the wind-warped firs, there lay the body of
Christopher Lovelock, with his dead horse near him, the yellow gravel and
lilac ling soaked crimson all around; and above emerged, as out of the redness, the pale blond head covered with the grey hat, the absent eyes, and strange smile of Mrs. Oke. It seemed to me horrible, vulgar, abominable, as if I had got inside a madhouse.
I don't know whether he had any words with his wife about her
masquerade of that unlucky evening. On the whole I decidedly think not. Oke
was with every one a diffident and reserved man, and most of all so with
his wife; besides, I can fancy that he would experience a positive
impossibility of putting into words any strong feeling of disapprobation
towards her, that his disgust would necessarily be silent. But be this as
it may, I perceived very soon that the relations between my host and
hostess had become exceedingly strained. Mrs. Oke, indeed, had never paid
much attention to her husband, and seemed merely a trifle more indifferent
to his presence than she had been before. But Oke himself, although he
affected to address her at meals from a desire to conceal his feeling, and
a fear of making the position dis-
agreeable to me, very clearly could scarcely bear to speak to or even see his wife. The poor fellow's honest soul was quite brimful of pain, which he was determined not to allow to overflow, and which seemed to filter into his whole nature and poison it. This woman had shocked and pained him more than was possible to say, and yet it was evident that he could neither cease loving her nor commence comprehending her real nature. I sometimes felt, as we took our long walks through the monotonous country, across the oak-dotted grazing-grounds, and by the brink of the dull-green, serried hop-rows, talking at rare intervals about the value of the crops, the drainage of the estate, the village schools, the Primrose League, and the iniquities of Mr. Gladstone, while Oke of Okehurst carefully cut down every tall thistle that caught his eye--I sometimes felt, I say, an intense and impotent desire to enlighten this man about his wife's character. I seemed to understand it so well, and to understand it well seemed to imply such a comfortable acquiescence; and it seemed so unfair that just he should be condemned to puzzle for ever over this enigma, and wear out his soul trying to comprehend what now seemed so plain to me. But how would it ever be possible to get this serious, conscientious, slow-brained representative of English simplicity and honesty and thoroughness to understand the mixture of self-engrossed vanity, of shallowness, of poetic vision, of love of morbid
excitement, that walked this earth under the name of Alice Oke?
So Oke of Okehurst was condemned never to understand; but he was
condemned also to suffer from his inability to do so. The poor fellow was
constantly straining after an explanation of his wife's peculiarities;
and although the effort was probably unconscious, it caused him a great
deal of pain. The gash--the maniac-frown, as my friend calls
it--between his eyebrows, seemed to have grown a permanent feature of
his face.
Mrs. Oke, on her side, was making the very worst of the situation.
Perhaps she resented her husband's tacit reproval of that masquerade
night's freak, and determined to make him swallow more of the same
stuff, for she clearly thought that one of William's peculiarities,
and one for which she despised him, was that he could never be goaded into
an outspoken expression of disapprobation; that from her he would swallow
any amount of bitterness without complaining. At any rate she now adopted a
perfect policy of teasing and shocking her husband about the murder of
Lovelock. She was perpetually alluding to it in her conversation,
discussing in his presence what had or had not been the feelings of the
various actors in the tragedy of 1626, and insisting upon her resemblance
and almost identity with the original Alice Oke. Something had suggested to
her eccentric mind that it would be delightful to perform in the garden at
Okehurst, under the huge ilexes and elms, a little masque which she had discovered among Christopher Lovelock's works; and she began to scour the country and enter into vast correspondence for the purpose of effectuating this scheme. Letters arrived every other day from the theatrical cousin, whose only objection was that Okehurst was too remote a locality for an entertainment in which he foresaw great glory to himself. And every now and then there would arrive some young gentleman or lady, whom Alice Oke had sent for to see whether they would do.
I saw very plainly that the performance would never take place, and that
Mrs. Oke herself had no intention that it ever should. She was one of those
creatures to whom realisation of a project is nothing, and who enjoy
plan-making almost the more for knowing that all will stop short at the
plan. Meanwhile, this perpetual talk about the pastoral, about Lovelock,
this continual attitudinising as the wife of Nicholas Oke, had the further
attraction to Mrs. Oke of putting her husband into a condition of frightful
though suppressed irritation, which she enjoyed with the enjoyment of a
perverse child. You must not think that I looked on indifferent, although I
admit that this was a perfect treat to an amateur student of character like
myself. I really did feel most sorry for poor Oke, and frequently quite
indignant with his wife. I was several times on the point of begging her to
have more consideration for him, even of suggesting that this kind of behaviour, particularly before a comparative stranger like me, was very poor taste. But there was something elusive about Mrs. Oke, which made it next to impossible to speak seriously with her; and besides, I was by no means sure that any interference on my part would not merely animate her perversity.
One evening a curious incident took place. We had just sat down to
dinner, the Okes, the theatrical cousin, who was down for a couple of days,
and three or four neighbours. It was dusk, and the yellow light of the
candles mingled charmingly with the greyness of the evening. Mrs. Oke was
not well, and had been remarkably quiet all day, more diaphanous, strange,
and far-away than ever; and her husband seemed to have felt a sudden return
of tenderness, almost of compassion, for this delicate, fragile creature.
We had been talking of quite indifferent matters, when I saw Mr. Oke
suddenly turn very white, and look fixedly for a moment at the window
opposite to his seat.
"Who's that fellow looking in at the window, and making signs
to you, Alice? Damn his impudence!" he cried, and jumping up, ran to
the window, opened it, and passed out into the twilight. We all looked at
each other in surprise; some of the party remarked upon the carelessness of
servants in letting nasty-looking fellows hang about the kitchen, others
told stories of tramps
and burglars. Mrs. Oke did not speak; but I noticed the curious, distant-looking smile in her thin cheeks.
After a minute William Oke came in, his napkin in his hand. He shut the
window behind him and silently resumed his place.
"Well, who was it?" we all asked.
"Nobody. I--I must have made a mistake," he answered,
and turned crimson, while he busily peeled a pear.
"It was probably Lovelock," remarked Mrs. Oke, just as she
might have said, "It was probably the gardener," but with that
faint smile of pleasure still in her face. Except the theatrical cousin,
who burst into a loud laugh, none of the company had ever heard
Lovelock's name, and, doubtless imagining him to be some natural
appanage of the Oke family, groom or farmer, said nothing, so the subject
dropped.
From that evening onwards things began to assume a different aspect.
That incident was the beginning of a perfect system--a system of what?
I scarcely know how to call it. A system of grim jokes on the part of Mrs.
Oke, of superstitious fancies on the part of her husband--a system of
mysterious persecutions on the part of some less earthly tenant of
Okehurst. Well, yes, after all, why not? We have all heard of ghosts, had
uncles, cousins, grandmothers, nurses, who have seen them; we are all a bit
afraid of them at the
bottom of our soul; so why shouldn't they be? I am too sceptical to believe in the impossibility of anything, for my part! Besides, when a man has lived throughout a summer in the same house with a woman like Mrs. Oke of Okehurst, he gets to believe in the possibility of a great many improbable things, I assure you, as a mere result of believing in her. And when you come to think of it, why not? That a weird creature, visibly not of this earth, a reincarnation of a woman who murdered her lover two centuries and a half ago, that such a creature should have the power of attracting about her (being altogether superior to earthly lovers) the man who loved her in that previous existence, whose love for her was his death--what is there astonishing in that? Mrs. Oke herself, I feel quite persuaded, believed or half believed it; indeed she very seriously admitted the possibility thereof, one day that I made the suggestion half in jest. At all events, it rather pleased me to think so; it fitted in so well with the woman's whole personality; it explained those hours and hours spent all alone in the yellow room, where the very air, with its scent of heady flowers and old perfumed stuffs, seemed redolent of ghosts. It explained that strange smile which was not for any of us, and yet was not merely for herself--that strange, far-off look in the wide pale eyes. I liked the idea, and I liked to tease, or rather to delight her with it. How should I know that
the wretched husband would take such matters seriously?
He became day by day more silent and perplexed-looking; and, as a
result, worked harder, and probably with less effect, at his land-improving
schemes and political canvassing. It seemed to me that he was perpetually
listening, watching, waiting for something to happen: a word spoken
suddenly, the sharp opening of a door, would make him start, turn crimson,
and almost tremble; the mention of Lovelock brought a helpless look, half a
convulsion, like that of a man overcome by great heat, into his face. And
his wife, so far from taking any interest in his altered looks, went on
irritating him more and more. Every time that the poor fellow gave one of
those starts of his, or turned crimson at the sudden sound of a footstep,
Mrs. Oke would ask him, with her contemptuous indifference, whether he had
seen Lovelock. I soon began to perceive that my host was getting perfectly
ill. He would sit at meals never saying a word, with his eyes fixed
scrutinisingly on his wife, as if vainly trying to solve some dreadful
mystery; while his wife, ethereal, exquisite, went on talking in her
listless way about the masque, about Lovelock, always about Lovelock.
During our walks and rides, which we continued pretty regularly, he would
start whenever in the roads or lanes surrounding Okehurst, or in its
grounds, we perceived a figure in the distance. I have seen
him tremble at what, on nearer approach, I could scarcely restrain my laughter on discovering to be some well-known farmer or neighbour or servant. Once, as we were returning home at dusk, he suddenly caught my arm and pointed across the oak-dotted pastures in the direction of the garden, then started off almost at a run, with his dog behind him, as if in pursuit of some intruder.
"Who was it?" I asked. And Mr. Oke merely shook his head
mournfully. Sometimes in the early autumn twilights, when the white mists
rose from the park-land, and the rooks formed long black lines on the
palings, I almost fancied I saw him start at the very trees and bushes, the
outlines of the distant oast-houses, with their conical roofs and
projecting vanes, like gibing fingers in the half light.
"Your husband is ill," I once ventured to remark to Mrs.
Oke, as she sat for the hundred-and-thirtieth of my preparatory sketches (I
somehow could never get beyond preparatory sketches with her). She raised
her beautiful, wide, pale eyes, making as she did so that exquisite curve
of shoulders and neck and delicate pale head that I so vainly longed to
reproduce.
"I don't see it," she answered quietly. "If he
is, why doesn't he go up to town and see the doctor? It's merely
one of his glum fits."
"You should not tease him about Lovelock," I
added, very seriously. "He will get to believe in him."
"Why not? If he sees him, why he sees him. He would not be the
only person that has done so;" and she smiled faintly and half
perversely, as her eyes sought that usual distant indefinable
something.
But Oke got worse. He was growing perfectly unstrung, like a hysterical
woman. One evening that we were sitting alone in the smoking-room, he began
unexpectedly a rambling discourse about his wife; how he had first known
her when they were children, and they had gone to the same dancing-school
near Portland Place; how her mother, his aunt-in-law, had brought her for
Christmas to Okehurst while he was on his holidays; how finally, thirteen
years ago, when he was twenty-three and she was eighteen, they had been
married; how terribly he had suffered when they had been disappointed of
their baby, and she had nearly died of the illness.
"I did not mind about the child, you know," he said in an
excited voice; "although there will be an end of us now, and Okehurst
will go to the Curtises. I minded only about Alice." It was next to
inconceivable that this poor excited creature, speaking almost with tears
in his voice and in his eyes, was the quiet, well-got-up, irreproachable
young ex-Guardsman who had walked into my studio a couple of months
before.
Oke was silent for a moment, looking fixedly at the rug at his feet,
when he suddenly burst out in a scarce audible voice--
"If you knew how I cared for Alice--how I still care for her.
I could kiss the ground she walks upon. I would give anything--my life
any day--if only she would look for two minutes as if she liked me a
little--as if she didn't utterly despise me;" and the poor
fellow burst into a hysterical laugh, which was almost a sob. Then he
suddenly began to laugh outright, exclaiming, with a sort of vulgarity of
intonation which was extremely foreign to him--
"Damn it, old fellow, this is a queer world we live
in!" and rang for more brandy and soda, which he was beginning, I
noticed, to take pretty freely now, although he had been almost a
blue-ribbon man--as much so as is possible for a hospitable country
gentleman--when I first arrived.
Besides the fact that Mrs. Oke took only just a very little more interest in me than in the butler or the upper-housemaid, I think that Oke himself was the sort of man whose imagination would recoil from realising any definite object of jealousy, even though jealousy might be killing him inch by inch. It remained a vague, permeating, continuous feeling--the feeling that he loved her, and she did not care a jackstraw about him, and that everything with which she came into contact was receiving some of that notice which was refused to him--every person, or thing, or tree, or stone: it was the recognition of that strange far-off look in Mrs. Oke's eyes, of that strange absent smile on Mrs. Oke's lips--eyes and lips that had no look and no smile for him.
Gradually his nervousness, his watchfulness, suspiciousness, tendency to
start, took a definite shape. Mr. Oke was for ever alluding to steps or
voices he had heard, to figures he had seen sneaking round the house. The
sudden bark of one of the dogs would make him jump up. He cleaned and
loaded very carefully all the guns and revolvers in his study, and even
some of the old fowling-pieces and holster-pistols in the hall. The
servants and tenants thought that Oke of Okehurst had been seized with a
terror of tramps and burglars. Mrs. Oke smiled contemptuously at all these
doings.
"My dear William," she said one day, "the
persons who worry you have just as good a right to walk up and down the passages and staircase, and to hang about the house, as you or I. They were there, in all probability, long before either of us was born, and are greatly amused by your preposterous notions of privacy."
Mr. Oke laughed angrily. "I suppose you will tell me it is
Lovelock--your eternal Lovelock--whose steps I hear on the gravel
every night. I suppose he has as good a right to be here as you or
I." And he strode out of the room.
"Lovelock--Lovelock! Why will she always go on like that
about Lovelock?" Mr. Oke asked me that evening, suddenly staring me
in the face.
I merely laughed.
"It's only because she has that play of his on the
brain," I answered: "and because she thinks you superstitious,
and likes to tease you."
"I don't understand," sighed Oke.
How could he? And if I had tried to make him do so, he would merely have
thought I was insulting his wife, and have perhaps kicked me out of the
room. So I made no attempt to explain psychological problems to him, and he
asked me no more questions until once-- But I must first mention a
curious incident that happened.
The incident was simply this. Returning one afternoon from our usual
walk, Mr. Oke suddenly asked the servant whether any one had come. The
answer was in the negative; but Oke did not
seem satisfied. We had hardly sat down to dinner when he turned to his wife and asked, in a strange voice which I scarcely recognised as his own, who had called that afternoon.
"No one," answered Mrs. Oke; "at least to the best of
my knowledge."
William Oke looked at her fixedly.
"No one?" he repeated, in a scrutinising tone; "no
one, Alice?"
Mrs. Oke shook her head. "No one," she replied.
There was a pause.
"Who was it, then, that was walking with you near the pond, about
five o'clock?" asked Oke slowly.
His wife lifted her eyes straight to his and answered
contemptuously--
"No one was walking with me near the pond, at five o'clock or
any other hour."
Mr. Oke turned purple, and made a curious hoarse noise like a man
choking.
"I--I thought I saw you walking with a man this afternoon,
Alice," he brought out with an effort; adding, for the sake of
appearances before me, "I thought it might have been the curate come
with that report for me."
Mrs. Oke smiled.
"I can only repeat that no living creature has been near me this
afternoon," she said slowly. "If you saw any one with me, it
must have been Lovelock, for there certainly was no one else."
And she gave a little sigh, like a person trying to reproduce in her
mind some delightful but too evanescent impression.
I looked at my host; from crimson his face had turned perfectly livid,
and he breathed as if some one were squeezing his windpipe.
No more was said about the matter. I vaguely felt that a great danger
was threatening. To Oke or to Mrs. Oke? I could not tell which; but I was
aware of an imperious inner call to avert some dreadful evil, to exert
myself, to explain, to interpose. I determined to speak to Oke the
following day, for I trusted him to give me a quiet hearing, and I did not
trust Mrs. Oke. That woman would slip through my fingers like a snake if I
attempted to grasp her elusive character.
I asked Oke whether he would take a walk with me the next afternoon, and
he accepted to do so with a curious eagerness. We started about three
o'clock. It was a stormy, chilly afternoon, with great balls of white
clouds rolling rapidly in the cold blue sky, and occasional lurid gleams of
sunlight, broad and yellow, which made the black ridge of the storm,
gathered on the horizon, look blue-black like ink.
We walked quickly across the sere and sodden grass of the park, and on
to the highroad that led over the low hills, I don't know why, in the
direction of Cotes Common. Both of us were silent, for both of us had
something to say, and did not
know how to begin. For my part, I recognised the impossibility of starting the subject: an uncalled-for interference from me would merely indispose Mr. Oke, and make him doubly dense of comprehension. So, if Oke had something to say, which he evidently had, it was better to wait for him.
Oke, however, broke the silence only by pointing out to me the condition
of the hops, as we passed one of his many hop-gardens. "It will be a
poor year," he said, stopping short and looking intently before
him--"no hops at all. No hops this autumn."
I looked at him. It was clear that he had no notion what he was saying.
The dark-green bines were covered with fruit; and only yesterday he himself
had informed me that he had not seen such a profusion of hops for many
years.
I did not answer, and we walked on. A cart met us in a dip of the road,
and the carter touched his hat and greeted Mr. Oke. But Oke took no heed;
he did not seem to be aware of the man's presence.
The clouds were collecting all round; black domes, among which coursed
the round grey masses of fleecy stuff.
"I think we shall be caught in a tremendous storm," I said;
"hadn't we better be turning?" He nodded, and turned sharp
round.
The sunlight lay in yellow patches under the oaks of the pasture-lands,
and burnished the green
hedges. The air was heavy and yet cold, and everything seemed preparing for a great storm. The rooks whirled in black clouds round the trees and the conical red caps of the oast-houses which give that country the look of being studded with turreted castles; then they descended--a black line--upon the fields, with what seemed an unearthly loudness of caw. And all round there arose a shrill quavering bleating of lambs and calling of sheep, while the wind began to catch the topmost branches of the trees.
Suddenly Mr. Oke broke the silence.
"I don't know you very well," he began hurriedly, and
without turning his face towards me; "but I think you are honest, and
you have seen a good deal of the world--much more than I. I want you
to tell me--but truly, please--what do you think a man should do
if"--and he stopped for some minutes.
"Imagine," he went on quickly, "that a man cares a
great deal--a very great deal for his wife, and that he find out that
she--well, that--that she is deceiving him. No--don't
misunderstand me; I mean--that she is constantly surrounded by some
one else and will not admit it--some one whom she hides away. Do you
understand? Perhaps she does not know all the risk she is running, you
know, but she will not draw back--she will not avow it to her
husband"--
"My dear Oke," I interrupted, attempting to
take the matter lightly, "these are questions that can't be solved in the abstract, or by people to whom the thing has not happened. And it certainly has not happened to you or me."
Oke took no notice of my interruption. "You see," he went
on, "the man doesn't expect his wife to care much about him.
It's not that; he isn't merely jealous, you know. But he feels
that she is on the brink of dishonouring herself--because I don't
think a woman can really dishonour her husband; dishonour is in our own
hands, and depends only on our own acts. He ought to save her, do you see?
He must, must save her, in one way or another. But if she will not listen
to him, what can he do? Must he seek out the other one, and try and get him
out of the way? You see it's all the fault of the other--not
hers, not hers. If only she would trust in her husband, she would be safe.
But that other one won't let her."
"Look here, Oke," I said boldly, but feeling rather
frightened; "I know quite well what you are talking about. And I see
you don't understand the matter in the very least. I do. I have
watched you and watched Mrs. Oke these six weeks, and I see what is the
matter. Will you listen to me?"
And taking his arm, I tried to explain to him my view of the
situation--that his wife was merely eccentric, and a little theatrical
and imaginative, and that she took a pleasure in teasing him. That he,
on the other hand, was letting himself get into a morbid state; that he was ill, and ought to see a good doctor. I even offered to take him to town with me.
I poured out volumes of psychological explanations. I dissected Mrs.
Oke's character twenty times over, and tried to show him that there
was absolutely nothing at the bottom of his suspicions beyond an
imaginative pose and a garden-play on the
brain. I adduced twenty instances, mostly invented for the nonce, of ladies
of my acquaintance who had suffered from similar fads. I pointed out to him
that his wife ought to have an outlet for her imaginative and theatrical
over-energy. I advised him to take her to London and plunge her into some
set where every one should be more or less in a similar condition. I
laughed at the notion of there being any hidden individual about the house.
I explained to Oke that he was suffering from delusions, and called upon so
conscientious and religious a man to take every step to rid himself of
them, adding innumerable examples of people who had cured themselves of
seeing visions and of brooding over morbid fancies. I struggled and
wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, and I really hoped I had made some
impression. At first, indeed, I felt that not one of my words went into the
man's brain--that, though silent, he was not listening. It seemed
almost hopeless to present my views in such a light that he could grasp
them.
I felt as if I were expounding and arguing at a rock. But when I got on to the tack of his duty towards his wife and himself, and appealed to his moral and religious notions, I felt that I was making an impression.
"I daresay you are right," he said, taking my hand as we
came in sight of the red gables of Okehurst, and speaking in a weak, tired,
humble voice. "I don't understand you quite, but I am sure what
you say is true. I daresay it is all that I'm seedy. I feel sometimes
as if I were mad, and just fit to be locked up. But don't think I
don't struggle against it. I do, I do continually, only sometimes it
seems too strong for me. I pray God night and morning to give me the
strength to overcome my suspicions, or to remove these dreadful thoughts
from me. God knows, I know what a wretched creature I am, and how unfit to
take care of that poor girl."
And Oke again pressed my hand. As we entered the garden, he turned to me
once more.
"I am very, very grateful to you," he said, "and,
indeed, I will do my best to try and be stronger. If only," he added,
with a sigh, "if only Alice would give me a moment's
breathing-time, and not go on day after day mocking me with her
Lovelock."
"Such love as that," she said, looking into the far distance
of the oak-dotted park-land, "is very rare, but it can exist. It
becomes a person's whole existence, his whole soul; and it can survive
the death, not merely of the beloved, but of the lover. It is
unextinguishable, and goes on in the spiritual world until it meet a
reincarnation of the beloved; and when this happens, it jets out and draws
to it all that may remain of that lover's soul, and takes shape and
surrounds the beloved one once more."
Mrs. Oke was speaking slowly, almost to
her-
self, and I had never, I think, seen her look so strange and so beautiful, the stiff white dress bringing out but the more the exotic exquisiteness and incorporealness of her person.
I did not know what to answer, so I said half in jest--
"I fear you have been reading too much Buddhist literature, Mrs.
Oke. There is something dreadfully esoteric in all you say."
She smiled contemptuously.
"I know people can't understand such matters," she
replied, and was silent for some time. But, through her quietness and
silence, I felt, as it were, the throb of a strange excitement in this
woman, almost as if I had been holding her pulse.
Still, I was in hopes that things might be beginning to go better in
consequence of my interference. Mrs. Oke had scarcely once alluded to
Lovelock in the last two or three days; and Oke had been much more cheerful
and natural since our conversation. He no longer seemed so worried; and
once or twice I had caught in him a look of great gentleness and
loving-kindness, almost of pity, as towards some young and very frail
thing, as he sat opposite his wife.
But the end had come. After that sitting Mrs. Oke had complained of
fatigue and retired to her room, and Oke had driven off on some business to
the nearest town. I felt all alone in the big house, and after having
worked a little at a sketch
I was making in the park, I amused myself rambling about the house.
It was a warm, enervating, autumn afternoon: the kind of weather that
brings the perfume out of everything, the damp ground and fallen leaves,
the flowers in the jars, the old woodwork and stuffs; that seems to bring
on to the surface of one's consciousness all manner of vague
recollections and expectations, a something half pleasurable, half painful,
that makes it impossible to do or to think. I was the prey of this
particular, not at all unpleasurable, restlessness. I wandered up and down
the corridors, stopping to look at the pictures, which I knew already in
every detail, to follow the pattern of the carvings and old stuffs, to
stare at the autumn flowers, arranged in magnificent masses of colour in
the big china bowls and jars. I took up one book after another and threw it
aside; then I sat down to the piano and began to play irrelevant fragments.
I felt quite alone, although I had heard the grind of the wheels on the
gravel, which meant that my host had returned. I was lazily turning over a
book of verses--I remember it perfectly well, it was Morris's
'Love is Enough'--in a corner of the drawing-room, when
the door suddenly opened and William Oke showed himself. He did not enter,
but beckoned to me to come out to him. There was something in his face that
made me start up and follow him at once. He was ex-
tremely quiet, even stiff, not a muscle of his face moving, but very pale.
"I have something to show you," he said, leading me through
the vaulted hall, hung round with ancestral pictures, into the gravelled
space that looked like a filled-up moat, where stood the big blasted oak,
with its twisted, pointing branches. I followed him on to the lawn, or
rather the piece of park-land that ran up to the house. We walked quickly,
he in front, without exchanging a word. Suddenly he stopped, just where
there jutted out the bow-window of the yellow drawing-room, and I felt
Oke's hand tight upon my arm.
"I have brought you here to see something," he whispered
hoarsely; and he led me to the window.
I looked in. The room, compared with the out door, was rather dark; but
against the yellow wall I saw Mrs. Oke sitting alone on a couch in her
white dress, her head slightly thrown back, a large red rose in her
hand.
"Do you believe now?" whispered Oke's voice hot at my
ear. "Do you believe now? Was it all my fancy? But I will have him
this time. I have locked the door inside, and, by God! he shan't
escape."
The words were not out of Oke's mouth. I felt myself struggling
with him silently outside that window. But he broke loose, pulled open the
window, and leapt into the room, and I after him.
As I crossed the threshold, something flashed in my eyes; there was a loud report, a sharp cry, and the thud of a body on the ground.
Oke was standing in the middle of the room, with a faint smoke about
him; and at his feet, sunk down from the sofa, with her blond head resting
on its seat, lay Mrs. Oke, a pool of red forming in her white dress. Her
mouth was convulsed, as if in that automatic shriek, but her wide-open
white eyes seemed to smile vaguely and distantly.
I know nothing of time. It all seemed to be one second, but a second
that lasted hours. Oke stared, then turned round and laughed.
"The damned rascal has given me the slip again!" he cried;
and quickly unlocking the door, rushed out of the house with dreadful
cries.
That is the end of the story. Oke tried to shoot himself that evening,
but merely fractured his jaw, and died a few days later, raving. There were
all sorts of legal inquiries, through which I went as through a dream; and
whence it resulted that Mr. Oke had killed his wife in a fit of momentary
madness. That was the end of Alice Oke. By the way, her maid brought me a
locket which was found round her neck, all stained with blood. It contained
some very dark auburn hair, not at all the colour of William Oke's. I
am quite sure it was Lovelock's.
O cursed human voice, violin of flesh and blood, fashioned with the
subtle tools, the cunning hands, of Satan! O execrable art of singing, have
you not wrought mischief enough in the past, degrading so much noble
genius, corrupting the purity of Mozart, reducing Handel to a writer of
high-class singing-exercises, and defrauding the world of the only
inspiration worthy of Sophocles and Euripides, the poetry of the great poet
Gluck? Is it not
enough to have dishonoured a whole century in idolatry of that wicked and contemptible wretch the singer, without persecuting an obscure young composer of our days, whose only wealth is his love of nobility in art, and perhaps some few grains of genius?
And then they compliment me upon the perfection with which I imitate the
style of the great dead masters; or ask me very seriously whether, even if
I could gain over the modern public to this bygone style of music, I could
hope to find singers to perform it. Sometimes, when people talk as they
have been talking to-day, and laugh when I declare myself a follower of
Wagner, I burst into a paroxysm of unintelligible, childish rage, and
exclaim, "We shall see that some day!"
Yes; some day we shall see! For, after all, may I not recover from this
strangest of maladies? It is still possible that the day may come when all
these things shall seem but an incredible nightmare; the day when
Ogier the Dane shall be completed, and men shall know whether
I am a follower of the great master of the Future or the miserable
singing-masters of the Past. I am but half-bewitched, since I am conscious
of the spell that binds me. My old nurse, far off in Norway, used to tell
me that were-wolves are ordinary men and women half their days, and that
if, during that period, they become aware of their horrid transformation
they may find the means
to forestall it. May this not be the case with me? My reason, after all, is free, although my artistic inspiration be enslaved; and I can despise and loathe the music I am forced to compose, and the execrable power that forces me.
Nay, is it not because I have studied with the doggedness of hatred this
corrupt and corrupting music of the Past, seeking for every little
peculiarity of style and every biographical trifle merely to display its
vileness, is it not for this presumptuous courage that I have been
overtaken by such mysterious, incredible vengeance?
And meanwhile, my only relief consists in going over and over again in
my mind the tale of my miseries. This time I will write it, writing only to
tear up, to throw the manuscript unread into the fire. And yet, who knows?
As the last charred pages shall crackle and slowly sink into the red
embers, perhaps the spell may be broken, and I may possess once more my
long-lost liberty, my vanished genius.
It was a breathless evening under the full moon, that implacable full
moon beneath which, even more than beneath the dreamy splendour of
noon-tide, Venice seemed to swelter in the midst of the waters, exhaling,
like some great lily, mysterious influences, which make the brain swim and
the heart faint--a moral malaria, distilled, as I thought, from those
languishing melodies, those cooing vocalisations which I had found in the
musty
music-books of a century ago. I see that moonlight evening as if it were present. I see my fellow-lodgers of that little artists' boarding-house. The table on which they lean after supper is strewn with bits of bread, with napkins rolled in tapestry rollers, spots of wine here and there, and at regular intervals chipped pepper-pots, stands of toothpicks, and heaps of those huge hard peaches which nature imitates from the marble-shops of Pisa. The whole pension-full is assembled, and examining stupidly the engraving which the American etcher has just brought for me, knowing me to be mad about eighteenth century music and musicians, and having noticed, as he turned over the heaps of penny prints in the square of San Polo, that the portrait is that of a singer of those days.
Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice, of that
instrument which was not invented by the human intellect, but begotten of
the body, and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs up the dregs
of our nature! For what is the voice but the Beast calling, awakening that
other Beast sleeping in the depths of mankind, the Beast which all great
art has ever sought to chain up, as the archangel chains up, in old
pictures, the demon with his woman's face? How could the creature
attached to this voice, its owner and its victim, the singer, the great,
the real singer who once ruled over every heart, be otherwise than wicked
and
contemptible? But let me try and get on with my story.
I can see all my fellow-boarders, leaning on the table, contemplating
the print, this effeminate beau, his hair curled into
ailes de pigeon, his sword passed through his
embroidered pocket, seated under a triumphal arch somewhere among the
clouds, surrounded by puffy Cupids and crowned with laurels by a bouncing
goddess of fame. I hear again all the insipid exclamations, the insipid
questions about this singer:--"When did he live? Was he very
famous? Are you sure, Magnus, that this is really a portrait,"
&c. &c. And I hear my own voice, as if in the far distance, giving
them all sorts of information, biographical and critical, out of a battered
little volume called The Theatre of Musical Glory; or, Opinions upon
the most Famous Chapel-masters and Virtuosi of this Century, by
Father Prosdocimo Sabatelli, Barnalite, Professor of Eloquence at the
College of Modena, and Member of the Arcadian Academy, under the pastoral
name of Evander Lilybæan, Venice, 1785, with the approbation of the
Superiors. I tell them all how this singer, this Balthasar Cesari, was
nicknamed Zaffirino because of a sapphire engraved with cabalistic signs
presented to him one evening by a masked stranger, in whom wise folk
recognised that great cultivator of the human voice, the devil; how much
more wonderful had been this Zaffirino's vocal gifts than those of any
singer of ancient or modern times; how his
brief life had been but a series of triumphs, petted by the greatest kings, sung by the most famous poets, and finally, adds Father Prosdocimo, "courted (if the grave Muse of history may incline her ear to the gossip of gallantry) by the most charming nymphs, even of the very highest quality."
My friends glance once more at the engraving; more insipid remarks are
made; I am requested--especially by the American young ladies--to
play or sing one of this Zaffirino's favourite songs--"For
of course you know them, dear Maestro Magnus, you who have such a passion
for all old music. Do be good, and sit down to the piano." I refuse,
rudely enough, rolling the print in my fingers. How fearfully this cursed
heat, these cursed moonlight nights, must have unstrung me! This Venice
would certainly kill me in the long-run! Why, the sight of this idiotic
engraving, the mere name of that coxcomb of a singer, have made my heart
beat and my limbs turn to water like a love-sick hobbledehoy.
After my gruff refusal, the company begins to disperse; they prepare to
go out, some to have a row on the lagoon, others to saunter before the
cafés at St. Mark's; family
discussions arise, gruntings of fathers, murmurs of mothers, peals of
laughing from young girls and young men. And the moon, pouring in by the
wide-open windows, turns this old palace ballroom, nowadays an inn
dining-room, into a lagoon, scintillating, undulating like the other
lagoon, the real one, which stretches
out yonder furrowed by invisible gondolas betrayed by the red prow-lights. At last the whole lot of them are on the move. I shall be able to get some quiet in my room, and to work a little at my opera of Ogier the Dane. But no! Conversation revives, and, of all things, about that singer, that Zaffirino, whose absurd portrait I am crunching in my fingers.
The principal speaker is Count Alvise, an old Venetian with dyed
whiskers, a great check tie fastened with two pins and a chain; a
threadbare patrician who is dying to secure for his lanky son that pretty
American girl, whose mother is intoxicated by all his mooning anecdotes
about the past glories of Venice in general, and of his illustrious family
in particular. Why, in Heaven's name, must he pitch upon Zaffirino for
his mooning, this old duffer of a patrician?
"Zaffirino,--ah yes, to be sure! Balthasar Cesari, called
Zaffirino," snuffles the voice of Count Alvise, who always repeats
the last word of every sentence at least three times. "Yes,
Zaffirino, to be sure! A famous singer of the days of my forefathers; yes,
of my forefathers, dear lady!" Then a lot of rubbish about the former
greatness of Venice, the glories of old music, the former Conservatoires,
all mixed up with anecdotes of Rossini and Donizetti, whom he pretends to
have known intimately. Finally, a story, of course containing plenty about
his illustrious family:--"My great
grand-aunt, the Procuratessa Vendramin, from whom we have inherited our estate of Mistrà, on the Brenta"--a hopelessly muddled story, apparently, fully of digressions, but of which that singer Zaffirino is the hero. The narrative, little by little, becomes more intelligible, or perhaps it is I who am giving it more attention.
"It seems," says the Count, "that there was one of his
songs in particular which was called the 'Husbands'
Air'--L'Aria dei Marit--because
they didn't enjoy it quite as much as their better-halves.... My
grand-aunt, Pisana Renier, married to the Procuratore Vendramin, was a
patrician of the old school, of the style that was getting rare a hundred
years ago. Her virtue and her pride rendered her unapproachable. Zaffirino,
on his part, was in the habit of boasting that no woman had ever been able
to resist his singing, which, it appears, had its foundation in
fact--the ideal changes, my dear lady, the ideal changes a good deal
from one century to another!--and that his first song could make any
woman turn pale and lower her eyes, the second make her madly in love,
while the third song could kill her off on the spot, kill her for love,
there under his very eyes, if he only felt inclined. My grand-aunt
Vendramin laughed when this story was told her, refused to go to hear this
insolent dog, and added that it might be quite possible by the aid of
spells and infernal pacts to kill a
gentildonna, but as to
making her fall in love with a lackey--never! This answer was naturally reported to Zaffirino, who piqued himself upon always getting the better of any one who was wanting in deference to his voice. Like the ancient Romans, parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. You American ladies, who are so learned, will appreciate this little quotation from the divine Virgil. While seeming to avoid the Procuratessa Vendramin, Zaffirino took the opportunity, one evening at a large assembly, to sing in her presence. He sang and sang and sang until the poor grand-aunt Pisana fell ill for love. The most skilful physicians were kept unable to explain the mysterious malady which was visibly killing the poor young lady; and the Procuratore Vendramin applied in vain to the most venerated Madonnas, and vainly promised an altar of silver, with massive gold candlesticks, to Saints Cosmas and Damian, patrons of the art of healing. At last the brother-in-law of the Procuratessa, Monsignor Almorò Vendramin, Patriarch of Aquileia, a prelate famous for the sanctity of his life, obtained in a vision of Saint Justina, for whom he entertained a particular devotion, the information that the only thing which could benefit the strange illness of his sister-in-law was the voice of Zaffirino. Take notice that my poor grand-aunt had never condescended to such a revelation.
"The Procuratore was enchanted at this happy solution; and his
lordship the Patriarch went to seek Zaffirino in person, and carried him in
his
own coach to the Villa of Mistrà, where the Procuratessa was residing. On being told what was about to happen, my poor grand-aunt went into fits of rage, which were succeeded immediately by equally violent fits of joy. However, she never forgot what was due to her great position. Although sick almost unto death, she had herself arrayed with the greatest pomp, caused her face to be painted, and put on all her diamonds: it would seem as if she were anxious to affirm her full dignity before this singer. Accordingly she received Zaffirino reclining on a sofa which had been placed in the great ballroom of the Villa of Mistrà, and beneath the princely canopy; for the Vendramins, who had intermarried with the house of Mantua, possessed imperial fiefs and were princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Zaffirino saluted her with the most profound respect, but not a word passed between them. Only, the singer inquired from the Procuratore whether the illustrious lady had received the Sacraments of the Church. Being told that the Procuratessa had herself asked to be given extreme unction from the hands of her brother-in-law, he declared his readiness to obey the orders of His Excellency, and sat down at once to the harpsichord.
"Never had he sung so divinely. At the end of the first song the
Procuratessa Vendramin had already revived most extraordinarily; by the end
of the second she appeared entirely cured and
beaming with beauty and happiness; but at the third air--the Aria dei Mariti, no doubt--she began to change frightfully; she gave a dreadful cry, and fell into the convulsions of death. In a quarter of an hour she was dead! Zaffirino did not wait to see her die. Having finished his song, he withdrew instantly, took post-horses, and travelled day and night as far as Munich. People remarked that he had presented himself at Mistrà dressed in mourning, although he had mentioned no death among his relatives; also that he had prepared everything for his departure, as if fearing the wrath of so powerful a family. Then there was also the extraordinary question he had asked before beginning to sing, about the Procuratessa having confessed and received extreme unction.... No, thanks, my dear lady, no cigarettes for me. But if it does not distress you or your charming daughter, may I humbly beg permission to smoke a cigar?"
And Count Alvise, enchanted with his talent for narrative, and sure of
having secured for his son the heart and the dollars of his fair audience,
proceeds to light a candle, and at the candle one of those long black
Italian cigars which require preliminary disinfection before smoking.
... If this state of things goes on I shall just have to ask the doctor
for a bottle; this ridiculous beating of my heart and disgusting cold
perspiration have increased steadily during Count Alvise's narrative.
To keep myself in countenance
among the various idiotic commentaries on this cock-and-bull story of a vocal coxcomb and a vapouring great lady, I begin to unroll the engraving, and to examine stupidly the portrait of Zaffirino, once so renowned, now so forgotten. A ridiculous ass, this singer, under his triumphal arch, with his stuffed Cupids and the great fat winged kitchenmaid crowning him with laurels. How flat and vapid and vulgar it is, to be sure, all this odious eighteenth century!
But he, personally, is not so utterly vapid as I had thought. That
effeminate, fat face of his is almost beautiful, with an odd smile, brazen
and cruel. I have seen faces like this, if not in real life, at least in my
boyish romantic dreams, when I read Swinburne and Baudelaire, the faces of
wicked, vindictive women. Oh yes! he is decidedly a beautiful creature,
this Zaffirino, and his voice must have had the same sort of beauty and the
same expression of wickedness...
"Come on, Magnus," sound the voices of my fellow-boarders,
"be a good fellow and sing us one of the old chap's songs; or at
least something or other of that day, and we'll make believe it was
the air with which he killed that poor lady."
"Oh yes! the Aria dei Mariti, the
'Husbands' Air,'" mumbles old Alvise, between the
puffs at his impossible black cigar. "My poor grand-aunt, Pisana
Vendramin; he went and killed her with those songs of his, with that
Aria dei Mariti."
I feel senseless rage overcoming me. Is it that horrible palpitation (by
the way, there is a Norwegian doctor, my fellow-countryman, at Venice just
now) which is sending the blood to my brain and making me mad? The people
round the piano, the furniture, everything together seems to get mixed and
to turn into moving blobs of colour. I set to singing; the only thing which
remains distinct before my eyes being the portrait of Zaffirino, on the
edge of that boarding-house piano; the sensual, effeminate face, with its
wicked, cynical smile, keeps appearing and disappearing as the print wavers
about in the draught that makes the candles smoke and gutter. And I set to
singing madly, singing I don't know what. Yes; I begin to identify it:
'tis the Biondina in Gondoleta, the only song of
the eighteenth century which is still remembered by the Venetian people. I
sing it, mimicking every old-school grace; shakes, cadences, languishingly
swelled and diminished notes, and adding all manner of buffooneries, until
the audience, recovering from its surprise, begins to shake with laughing;
until I begin to laugh myself, madly, frantically, between the phrases of
the melody, my voice finally smothered in this dull, brutal laughter....
And then, to crown it all, I shake my fist at this long-dead singer,
looking at me with his wicked woman's face, with his mocking, fatuous
smile.
"Ah! you would like to be revenged on me
also!" I exclaim. "You would like me to write you nice roulades and flourishes, another nice Aria dei Mariti, my fine Zaffirino!"
That night I dreamed a very strange dream. Even in the big
half-furnished room the heat and closeness were stifling. The air seemed
laden with the scent of all manner of white flowers, faint and heavy in
their intolerable sweetness: tuberoses, gardenias, and jasmines drooping I
know not where in neglected vases. The moonlight had transformed the marble
floor around me into a shallow, shining. pool. On account of the heat I had
exchanged my bed for a big old-fashioned sofa of light wood, painted with
little nosegays and sprigs, like an old silk; and I lay there, not
attempting to sleep, and letting my thoughts go vaguely to my opera of
Ogier the Dane, of which I had long finished writing the
words, and for whose music I had hoped to find some inspiration in this
strange Venice, floating, as it were, in the stagnant lagoon of the past.
But Venice had merely put all my ideas into hopeless confusion; it was as
if there arose out of its shallow waters a miasma of long-dead melodies,
which sickened but intoxicated my soul. I lay on my sofa watching that pool
of whitish light, which rose higher and higher, little trickles of light
meeting it here and there, wherever the moon's rays struck upon some
polished surface; while huge shadows waved to and fro in the draught of the
open balcony.
I went over and over that old Norse story: how the Paladin, Ogier, one
of the knights of Charlemagne, was decoyed during his homeward wanderings
from the Holy Land by the arts of an enchantress, the same who had once
held in bondage the great Emperor Cæsar and given him King Oberon for
a son; how Ogier had tarried in that island only one day and one night, and
yet, when he came home to his kingdom, he found all changed, his friends
dead, his family dethroned, and not a man who knew his face; until at last,
driven hither and thither like a beggar, a poor minstrel had taken
compassion of his sufferings and given him all he could give--a song,
the song of the prowess of a hero dead for hundreds of years, the Paladin
Ogier the Dane.
The story of Ogier ran into a dream, as vivid as my waking thoughts had
been vague. I was looking no longer at the pool of moonlight spreading
round my couch, with its trickles of light and looming, waving shadows, but
the frescoed walls of a great saloon. It was not, as I recognised in a
second, the dining-room of that Venetian palace now turned into a
boarding-house. It was a far larger room, a real ballroom, almost circular
in its octagon shape, with eight huge white doors surrounded by stucco
mouldings, and, high on the vault of the ceiling, eight little galleries or
recesses like boxes at a theatre, intended no doubt for musicians and
spectators. The place was im-
perfectly lighted by only one of the eight chandeliers, which revolved slowly, like huge spiders, each on its long cord. But the light struck upon the gilt stuccoes opposite me, and on a large expanse of fresco, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, with Agamemnon and Achilles in Roman helmets, lappets, and knee-breeches. It discovered also one of the oil panels let into the mouldings of the roof, a goddess in lemon and lilac draperies, foreshortened over a great green peacock. Round the room, where the light reached, I could make out big yellow satin sofas and heavy gilded consoles; in the shadow of a corner was what looked like a piano, and farther in the shade one of those big canopies which decorate the anterooms of Roman palaces. I looked about me, wondering where I was: a heavy, sweet smell, reminding me of the flavour of a peach, filled the place.
Little by little I began to perceive sounds; little, sharp, metallic,
detached notes, like those of a mandoline; and there was united to them a
voice, very low and sweet, almost a whisper, which grew and grew and grew,
until the whole place was filled with that exquisite vibrating note, of a
strange, exotic, unique quality. The note went on, swelling and swelling.
Suddenly there was a horrible piercing shriek, and the thud of a body on
the floor, and all manner of smothered exclamations. There, close by the
canopy, a light suddenly appeared; and I could see, among the
dark figures moving to and fro in the room, a woman lying on the ground, surrounded by other women. Her blond hair, tangled, full of diamond-sparkles which cut through the half-darkness, was hanging dishevelled; the laces of her bodice had been cut, and her white breast shone among the sheen of jewelled brocade; her face was bent forwards, and a thin white arm trailed, like a broken limb, across the knees of one of the women who were endeavouring to lift her. There was a sudden splash of water against the floor, more confused exclamations, a hoarse, broken moan, and a gurgling, dreadful sound.... I awoke with a start and rushed to the window.
Outside, in the blue haze of the moon, the church and belfry of St.
George loomed blue and hazy, with the black hull and rigging, the red
lights, of a large steamer moored before them. From the lagoon rose a damp
sea-breeze. What was it all? Ah! I began to understand: that story of old
Count Alvise's, the death of his grand-aunt, Pisana Vendramin. Yes, it
was about that I had been dreaming.
I returned to my room; I struck a light, and sat down to my
writing-table. Sleep had become impossible. I tried to work at my opera.
Once or twice I thought I had got hold of what I had looked for so long....
But as soon as I tried to lay hold of my theme, there arose in my mind the
distant echo of that voice, of that long note swelled
slowly by insensible degrees, that long note whose tone was so strong and so subtle.
There are in the life of an artist moments when, still unable to seize
his own inspiration, or even clearly to discern it, he becomes aware of the
approach of that long-invoked idea. A mingled joy and terror warn him that
before another day, another hour have passed, the inspiration shall have
crossed the threshold of his soul and flooded it with its rapture. All day
I had felt the need of isolation and quiet, and at nightfall I went for. a
row on the most solitary part of the lagoon. All things seemed to tell that
I was going to meet my inspiration, and I awaited its coming as a lover
awaits his beloved.
I had stopped my gondola for a moment, and as I gently swayed to and fro
on the water, all paved with moonbeams, it seemed to me that I was on the
confines of an imaginary world. It lay close at hand, enveloped in
luminous, pale blue mist, through which the moon had cut a wide and
glistening path; out to sea, the little islands, like moored black boats,
only accentuated the solitude of this region of moonbeams and wavelets;
while the hum of the insects in orchards hard by merely added to the
impression of untroubled silence. On some such seas, I thought, must the
Paladin Ogier, have sailed when about to discover that during that sleep at
the enchantress's knees centuries had
elapsed and the heroic world had set, and the kingdom of prose had come.
While my gondola rocked stationary on that sea of moonbeams, I pondered
over that twilight of the heroic world. In the soft rattle of the water on
the hull I seemed to hear the rattle of all that armour, of all those
swords swinging rusty on the walls, neglected by the degenerate sons of the
great champions of old. I had long been in search of a theme which I called
the theme of the "Prowess of Ogier;" it was to appear from time
to time in the course of my opera, to develop at last into that song of the
Minstrel, which reveals to the hero that he is one of a long-dead world.
And at this moment I seemed to feel the presence of that theme. Yet an
instant, and my mind would be overwhelmed by that savage music, heroic,
funereal.
Suddenly there came across the lagoon, cleaving, chequering, and
fretting the silence with a lacework of sound even as the moon was fretting
and cleaving the water, a ripple of music, a voice breaking itself in a
shower of little scales and cadences and trills.
I sank back upon my cushions. The vision of heroic days had vanished,
and before my closed eyes there seemed to dance multitudes of little stars
of light, chasing ard interlacing like those sudden vocalisations.
"To shore! Quick!" I cried to the gondolier.
But the sounds had ceased; and there came from the orchards, with their
mulberry-trees glistening in the moonlight, and their black swaying
cypress-plumes, nothing save the confused hum, the monotonous chirp, of the
crickets.
I looked around me: on one side empty dunes, orchards, and meadows,
without house or steeple; on the other, the blue and misty sea, empty to
where distant islets were profiled black on the horizon.
A faintness overcame me, and I felt myself dissolve. For all of a sudden
a second ripple of voice swept over the lagoon, a shower of little notes,
which seemed to form a little mocking laugh.
Then again all was still. This silence lasted so long that I fell once
more to meditating on my opera. I lay in wait once more for the half-caught
theme. But no. It was not that theme for which I was waiting and watching
with baited breath. I realised my delusion when, on rounding the point of
the Giudecca, the murmur of a voice arose from the midst of the waters, a
thread of sound slender as a moonbeam, scarce audible, but exquisite, which
expanded slowly, insensibly, taking volume and body, taking flesh almost
and fire, an ineffable quality, full, passionate, but veiled, as it were,
in a subtle, downy wrapper. The note grew stronger and stronger, and warmer
and more passionate, until it burst through that strange and charming veil,
and emerged beaming, to break itself in the
luminous facets of a wonderful shake, long, superb, triumphant.
There was a dead silence.
"Row to St. Mark's!" I exclaimed.
"Quick!"
The gondola glided through the long, glittering track of moonbeams, and
rent the great band of yellow, reflected light, mirroring the cupolas of
St. Mark's, the lace-like pinnacles of the palace, and the slender
pink belfry, which rose from the lit-up water to the pale and bluish
evening sky.
In the larger of the two squares the military band was blaring through
the last spirals of a crescendo of Rossini. The
crowd was dispersing in this great open-air ballroom, and the sounds arose
which invariably follow upon out-of-door music. A clatter of spoons and
glasses, a rustle and grating of frocks and of chairs, and the click of
scabbards on the pavement. I pushed my way among the fashionable youths
contemplating the ladies while sucking the knob of their sticks; through
the serried ranks of respectable families, marching arm in arm with their
white frocked young ladies close in front. I took a seat before
Florian's, among the customers stretching themselves before departing,
and the waiters hurrying to and fro, clattering their empty cups and trays.
Two imitation Neapolitans were slipping their guitar and violin under their
arm, ready to leave the place.
"Stop!" I cried to them; "don't go yet. Sing
me something--sing La Camesella or Funiculì, funiculà--no matter what, provided you make a row;" and as they screamed and scraped their utmost, I added, "But can't you sing louder, d--n you!--sing louder, do you understand?"
I felt the need of noise, of yells and false notes, of something vulgar
and hideous to drive away that ghost-voice which was haunting me.
Again and again I told myself that it had been some silly prank of a
romantic amateur, hidden in the gardens of the shore or gliding unperceived
on the lagoon; and that the sorcery of moonlight and sea-mist had
transfigured for my excited brain mere humdrum roulades out of exercises of
Bordogni or Crescentini.
But all the same I continued to be haunted by that voice. My work was
interrupted ever and anon by the attempt to catch its imaginary echo; and
the heroic harmonies of my Scandinavian legend were strangely interwoven
with voluptuous phrases and florid cadences in which I seemed to hear again
that same accursed voice.
To be haunted by singing-exercises! It seemed too ridiculous for a man
who professedly despised the art of singing. And still, I preferred to
believe in that childish amateur, amusing himself with warbling to the
moon.
One day, while making these reflections the hundredth time over, my eyes
chanced to light
upon the portrait of Zaffirino, which my friend had pinned against the wall. I pulled it down and tore it into half a dozen shreds. Then, already ashamed of my folly, I watched the torn pieces float down from the window, wafted hither and thither by the sea-breeze. One scrap got caught in a yellow blind below me; the others fell into the canal, and were speedily lost to sight in the dark water. I was overcome with shame. My heart beat like bursting. What a miserable, unnerved worm I had become in this cursed Venice, with its languishing moonlights, its atmosphere as of some stuffy boudoir, long unused, full of old stuffs and pot-pourri!
That night, however, things seemed to be going better. I was able to
settle down to my opera, and even to work at it. In the intervals my
thoughts returned, not without a certain pleasure, to those scattered
fragments of the torn engraving fluttering down to the water. I was
disturbed at my piano by the hoarse voices and the scraping of violins
which rose from one of those music-boats that station at night under the
hotels of the Grand Canal. The moon had set. Under my balcony the water
stretched black into the distance, its darkness cut by the still darker
outlines of the flotilla of gondolas in attendance on the music-boat, where
the faces of the singers, and the guitars and violins, gleamed reddish
under the unsteady light of the Chinese-lanterns.
"Jammo, jammo; jammo, jammo
jà," sang the loud, hoarse voices; then a tremendous
scrape and twang, and the yelled-out burden,
"Funiculì, funiculà; funiculì,
funiculà; jammo, jammo, jammo, jammo, jammo
jà."
Then came a few cries of "Bis,
Bis!" from a neighbouring hotel, a brief clapping of hands,
the sound of a handful of coppers rattling into the boat, and the
oar-stroke of some gondolier making ready to turn away.
"Sing the Camesella," ordered some
voice with a foreign accent.
"No, no! Santa Lucia."
"I want the Camesella."
"No! Santa Lucia. Hi! sing
Santa Lucia--d'you hear?"
The musicians, under their green and yellow and red lamps, held a
whispered consultation on the manner of conciliating these contradictory
demands. Then, after a minute's hesitation, the violins began the
prelude of that once famous air, which has remained popular in
Venice--the words written, some hundred years ago, by the patrician
Gritti, the music by an unknown composer--La Biondina
in Gondoleta.
That cursed eighteenth century! It seemed a malignant fatality that made
these brutes choose just this piece to interrupt me.
At last the long prelude came to an end; and above the cracked guitars
and squeaking fiddles
there arose, not the expected nasal chorus, but a single voice singing below its breath.
My arteries throbbed. How well I knew that voice! It was singing, as I
have said, below its breath, yet none the less it sufficed to fill all that
reach of the canal with its strange quality of tone, exquisite,
far-fetched.
They were long-drawn-out notes, of intense but peculiar sweetness, a
man's voice which had much of a woman's, but more even of a
chorister's, but a chorister's voice without its limpidity and
innocence; its youthfulness was veiled, muffled, as it were, in a sort of
downy vagueness, as if a passion of tears withheld.
There was a burst of applause, and the old palaces re-echoed with the
clapping. "Bravo, bravo! Thank you, thank you! Sing
again--please, sing again. Who can it be?"
And then a bumping of hulls, a splashing of oars, and the oaths of
gondoliers trying to push each other away, as the red prow-lamps of the
gondolas pressed round the gaily lit singing-boat.
But no one stirred on board. It was to none of them that this applause
was due. And while every one pressed on, and clapped and vociferated, one
little red prow-lamp dropped away from the fleet; for a moment a single
gondola stood forth black upon the black water, and then was lost in the
night.
For several days the mysterious singer was the universal topic. The
people of the music-boat swore that no one besides themselves had been on
board, and that they knew as little as ourselves about the owner of that
voice. The gondoliers, despite their descent from the spies of the old
Republic, were equally unable to furnish any clue. No musical celebrity was
known or suspected to be at Venice; and every one agreed that such a singer
must be a European celebrity. The strangest thing in this strange business
was, that even among those learned in music there was no agreement on the
subject of this voice: it was called by all sorts of names and described by
all manner of incongruous adjectives; people went so far as to dispute
whether the voice belonged to a man or to a woman: every one had some new
definition.
In all these musical discussions I, alone, brought forward no opinion. I
felt a repugnance, an impossibility almost, of speaking about that voice;
and the more or less commonplace conjectures of my friend had the
invariable effect of sending me out of the room.
Meanwhile my work was becoming daily more difficult, and I soon passed
from utter impotence to a state of inexplicable agitation. Every morning I
arose with fine resolutions and grand projects of work; only to go to bed
that night without having accomplished anything. I spent hours leaning
on my balcony, or wandering through the network of lanes with their ribbon of blue sky, endeavouring vainly to expel the thought of that voice, or endeavouring in reality to reproduce it in my memory; for the more I tried to banish it from my thoughts, the more I grew to thirst for that extraordinary tone, for those mysteriously downy, veiled notes; and no sooner did I make an effort to work at my opera than my head was full of scraps of forgotten eighteenth century airs, of frivolous or languishing little phrases; and I fell to wondering with a bitter-sweet longing how those songs would have sounded if sung by that voice.
At length it became necessary to see a doctor, from whom, however, I
carefully hid away all the stranger symptoms of my malady. The air of the
lagoons, the great heat, he answered cheerfully, had pulled me down a
little; a tonic and a month in the country, with plenty of riding and no
work, would make me myself again. That old idler, Count Alvise, who had
insisted on accompanying me to the physician's, immediately suggested
that I should go and stay with his son, who was boring himself to death
superintending the maize harvest on the mainland: he could promise me
excellent air, plenty of horses, and all the peaceful surroundings and the
delightful occupations of a rural life--"Be sensible, my dear
Magnus, and just go quietly to Mistrà."
Mistrà--the name sent a shiver all down me.
I was about to decline the invitation, when a thought suddenly loomed vaguely in my mind.
"Yes, dear Count," I answered; "I accept your
invitation with gratitude and pleasure. I will start to-morrow for
Mistrà."
The next day found me at Padua, on my way to the Villa of Mistrà.
It seemed as if I had left an intolerable burden behind me. I was, for the
first time since how long, quite light of heart. The tortuous, rough-paved
streets, with their empty, gloomy porticoes; the ill-plastered palaces,
with closed, discoloured shutters; the little rambling square, with meagre
trees and stubborn grass; the Venetian garden-houses reflecting their
crumbling graces in the muddy canal; the gardens without gates and the
gates without gardens, the avenues leading nowhere; and the population of
blind and legless beggars, of whining sacristans, which issued as by magic
from between the flag-stones and dust-heaps and weeds under the fierce
August sun, all this dreariness merely amused and pleased me. My good
spirits were heightened by a musical mass which I had the good fortune to
hear at St. Anthony's.
Never in all my days had I heard anything comparable, although Italy
affords many strange things in the way of sacred music. Into the deep nasal
chanting of the priests there had suddenly burst a chorus of children,
singing absolutely inde-
pendent of all time and tune; grunting of priests answered by squealing of boys, slow Gregorian modulation interrupted by jaunty barrel-organ pipings, an insane, insanely merry jumble of bellowing and barking, mewing and cackling and braying, such as would have enlivened a witches' meeting, or rather some mediæval Feast of Fools. And, to make the grotesqueness of such music still more fantastic and Hoffmannlike, there was, besides, the magnificence of the piles of sculptured marbles and gilded bronzes, the tradition of the musical splendour for which St. Anthony's had been famous in days gone by. I had read in old travellers, Lalande and Burney, that the Republic of St. Mark had squandered immense sums not merely on the monuments and decoration, but on the musical establishment of its great cathedral of Terra Firma. In the midst of this ineffable concert of impossible voices and instruments, I tried to imagine the voice of Guadagni, the soprano for whom Gluck had written Che farò senza Euridice, and the fiddle of Tartini, that Tartini with whom the devil had once come and made music. And the delight in anything so absolutely, barbarously, grotesquely, fantastically incongruous as such a performance in such a place was heightened by a sense of profanation: such were the successors of those wonderful musicians of that hated eighteenth century!
The whole thing had delighted me so much, so
very much more than the most faultless performance could have done, that I determined to enjoy it once more; and towards vesper-time, after a cheerful dinner with two bagmen at the inn of the Golden Star, and a pipe over the rough sketch of a possible cantata upon the music which the devil made for Tartini, I turned my steps once more towards St. Anthony's.
The bells were ringing for sunset, and a muffled sound of organs seemed
to issue from the huge, solitary church; I pushed my way under the heavy
leathern curtain, expecting to be greeted by the grotesque performance of
that morning.
I proved mistaken. Vespers must long have been over. A smell of stale
incense, a crypt-like damp filled my mouth; it was already night in that
vast cathedral. Out of the darkness glimmered the votive-lamps of the
chapels, throwing wavering lights upon the red polished marble, the gilded
railing, and chandeliers, and plaqueing with yellow the muscles of some
sculptured figure. In a corner a burning taper put a halo about the head of
a priest, burnishing his shining bald skull, his white surplice, and the
open book before him. "Amen" he chanted; the book was closed
with a snap, the light moved up the apse, some dark figures of women rose
from their knees and passed quickly towards the door; a man saying his
prayers before a chapel also got up, making a great clatter in dropping his
stick.
The church was empty, and I expected every minute to be turned out by
the sacristan making his evening round to close the doors. I was leaning
against a pillar, looking into the greyness of the great arches, when the
organ suddenly burst out into a series of chords, rolling through the
echoes of the church: it seemed to be the conclusion of some service. And
above the organ rose the notes of a voice; high, soft, enveloped in a kind
of downiness, like a cloud of incense, and which ran through the mazes of a
long cadence. The voice dropped into silence; with two thundering chords
the organ closed in. All was silent. For a moment I stood leaning against
one of the pillars of the nave: my hair was clammy, my knees sank beneath
me, an enervating heat spread through my body; I tried to breathe more
largely, to suck in the sounds with the incense-laden air. I was supremely
happy, and yet as if I were dying; then suddenly a chill ran through me,
and with it a vague panic. I turned away and hurried out into the open.
The evening sky lay pure and blue along the jagged line of roofs; the
bats and swallows were wheeling about; and from the belfries all around,
half-drowned by the deep bell of St. Anthony's, jangled the peel of
the Ave Maria.
"You really don't seem well," young Count Alvise had
said the previous evening, as he wel-
comed me, in the light of a lantern held up by a peasant, in the weedy back-garden of the Villa of Mistrà. Everything had seemed to me like a dream: the jingle of the horse's bells driving in the dark from Padua, as the lantern swept the acacia-hedges with their wide yellow light; the grating of the wheels on the gravel; the supper-table, illumined by a single petroleum lamp for fear of attracting mosquitoes, where a broken old lackey, in an old stable jacket, handed round the dishes among the fumes of onion; Alvise's fat mother gabbling dialect in a shrill, benevolent voice behind the bullfights on her fan; the unshaven village priest, perpetually fidgeting with his glass and foot, and sticking one shoulder up above the other. And now, in the afternoon, I felt as if I had been in this long, rambling, tumble-down Villa of Mistrà--a villa three-quarters of which was given up to the storage of grain and garden tools, or to the exercise of rats, mice, scorpions, and centipedes--all my life; as if I had always sat there, in Count Alvise's study, among the pile of undusted books on agriculture, the sheaves of accounts, the samples of grain and silkworm seed, the ink-stains and the cigar-ends; as if I had never heard of anything save the cereal basis of Italian agriculture, the diseases of maize, the peronospora of the vine, the breeds of bullocks, and the iniquities of farm labourers; with the blue cones of the Euganean hills closing in the green shimmer of plain outside the window.
After an early dinner, again with the screaming gabble of the fat old
Countess, the fidgeting and shoulder-raising of the unshaven priest, the
smell of fried oil and stewed onions, Count Alvise made me get into the
cart beside him, and whirled me along among clouds of dust, between the
endless glister of poplars, acacias, and maples, to one of his farms.
In the burning sun some twenty or thirty girls, in coloured skirts,
laced bodices, and big straw-hats, were threshing the maize on the big red
brick threshing-floor, while others were winnowing the grain in great
sieves. Young Alvise III. (the old one was Alvise II.: every one is Alvise,
that is to say, Lewis, in that family; the name is on the house, the carts,
the barrows, the very pails) picked up the maize, touched it, tasted it,
said something to the girls that made them laugh, and something to the head
farmer that made him look very glum; and then led me into a huge stable,
where some twenty or thirty white bullocks were stamping, switching their
tails, hitting their horns against the mangers in the dark. Alvise III.
patted each, called him by his name, gave him some salt or a turnip, and
explained which was the Mantuan breed, which the Apulian, which the
Romagnolo, and so on. Then he bade me jump into the trap, and off we went
again through the dust, among the hedges and ditches, till we came to some
more brick farm buildings with pinkish
roofs smoking against the blue sky. Here there were more young women threshing and winnowing the maize, which made a great golden Danaë cloud; more bullocks stamping and lowing in the cool darkness; more joking, fault-finding, explaining; and thus through five farms, until I seemed to see the rhythmical rising and falling of the flails against the hot sky, the shower of golden grains, the yellow dust from the winnowing-sieves on to the bricks, the switching of innumerable tails and plunging of innumerable horns, the glistening of huge white flanks and foreheads, whenever I closed my eyes.
"A good day's work!" cried Count Alvise, stretching out
his long legs with the tight trousers riding up over the Wellington boots.
"Mamma, give us some aniseed-syrup after dinner; it is an excellent
restorative and precaution against the fevers of this country."
"Oh! you've got fever in this part of the world, have you?
Why, your father said the air was so good!"
"Nothing, nothing," soothed the old Countess. "The
only thing to be dreaded are mosquitoes; take care to fasten your shutters
before lighting the candle."
"Well," rejoined young Alvise, with an effort of conscience,
"of course there are fevers. But they needn't hurt
you. Only, don' go out into the garden at night, if you don't
want to catch
them. Papa told me that you have fancies for moonlight rambles. It won't do in this climate, my dear fellow; it won't do. If you must stalk about at night, being a genius, take a turn inside the house; you can get quite exercise enough."
After dinner the aniseed-syrup was produced, together with brandy and
cigars, and they all sat in the long, narrow, half-furnished room on the
first floor; the old Countess knitting a garment of uncertain shape and
destination, the priest reading out the newspaper; Count Alvise puffing at
his long, crooked cigar, and pulling the ears of a long, lean dog with a
suspicion of mange and a stiff eye. From the dark garden outside rose the
hum and whirr of countless insects, and the smell of the grapes which hung
black against the starlit, blue sky, on the trellis. I went to the balcony.
The garden lay dark beneath; against the twinkling horizon stood out the
tall poplars. There was the sharp cry of an owl; the barking of a dog; a
sudden whiff of warm, enervating perfume, a perfume that made me think of
the taste of certain peaches, and suggested white, thick, wax-like petals.
I seemed to have smelt that flower once before: it made me feel languid,
almost faint.
"I am very tired," I said to Count Alvise. "See how
feeble we city folk become!"
But, despite my fatigue, I found it quite impossible to sleep. The night
seemed perfectly
stifling. I had felt nothing like it at Venice. Despite the injunctions of the Countess I opened the solid wooden shutters, hermetically closed against mosquitoes, and looked out.
The moon had risen; and beneath it lay the big lawns, the rounded
tree-tops, bathed in a blue, luminous mist, every leaf glistening and
trembling in what seemed a heaving sea of light. Beneath the window was the
long trellis, with the white shining piece of pavement under it. It was so
bright that I could distinguish the green of the vine-leaves, the dull red
of the catalpa-flowers. There was in the air a vague scent of cut grass, of
ripe American grapes, of that white flower (it must be white) which made me
think of the taste of peaches all melting into the delicious freshness of
falling dew. From the village church came the stroke of one: Heaven knows
how long I had been vainly attempting to sleep. A shiver ran through me,
and my head suddenly filled as with the fumes of some subtle wine; I
remembered all those weedy embankments, those canals full of stagnant
water, the yellow faces of the peasants; the word malaria returned to my
mind. No matter! I remained leaning on the window, with a thirsty longing
to plunge myself into this blue moon-mist, this dew and perfume and
silence, which seemed to vibrate and quiver like the stars that strewed the
depths of heaven.... What music, even Wagner's, or of that great
singer of starry nights, the divine
Schumann, what music could ever compare with this great silence, with this great concert of voiceless things that sing within one's soul?
As I made this reflection, a note, high, vibrating, and sweet, rent the
silence, which immediately closed around it. I leaned out of the window, my
heart beating as though it must burst. After a brief space the silence was
cloven once more by that note, as the darkness is cloven by a falling star
or a firefly rising slowly like a rocket. But this time it was plain that
the voice did not come, as I had imagined, from the garden, but from the
house itself, from some corner of this rambling old villa of
Mistrà.
Mistrà--Mistrà! The name rang in my ears, and I began
at length to grasp its significance, which seems to have escaped me till
then. "Yes," I said to myself, "it is quite
natural." And with this odd impression of naturalness was mixed a
feverish, impatient pleasure. It was as if I had come to Mistrà on
purpose, and that I was about to meet the object of my long and weary
hopes.
Grasping the lamp with its singed green shade, I gently opened the door
and made my way through a series of long passages and of big, empty rooms,
in which my steps re-echoed as in a church, and my light disturbed whole
swarms of bats. I wandered at random, farther and farther from the
inhabited part of the buildings.
This silence made me feel sick; I gasped as under a sudden
disappointment.
All of a sudden there came a sound--chords, metallic, sharp, rather
like the tone of a mandoline--close to my ear. Yes, quite close: I was
separated from the sounds only by a partition. I fumbled for a door; the
unsteady light of my lamp was insufficient for my eyes, which were swimming
like those of a drunkard. At last I found a latch, and, after a
moment's hesitation, I lifted it and gently pushed open the door. At
first I could not understand what manner of place I was in. It was dark all
round me, but a brilliant light blinded me, a light coming from below and
striking the opposite wall. It was as if I had entered a dark box in a
half-lighted theatre. I was, in fact, in something of the kind, a sort of
dark hole with a high balustrade, half-hidden by an up-drawn curtain. I
remembered those little galleries or recesses for the use of musicians or
lookers-on--which exist under the ceiling of the ballrooms in certain
old Italian palaces. Yes; it must have been one like that. Opposite me was
a vaulted ceiling covered with gilt mouldings, which framed great
time-blackened canvases; and lower down, in the light thrown up from below,
stretched a wall covered with faded frescoes. Where had I seen that goddess
in lilac and lemon draperies foreshortened over a big, green peacock? For
she was familiar to me, and the stucco Tritons also
who twisted their tails round her gilded frame. And that fresco, with warriors in Roman cuirasses and green and blue lappets, and knee-breeches--where could I have seen them before? I asked myself these questions without experiencing any surprise. Moreover, I was very calm, as one is calm sometimes in extraordinary dreams--could I be dreaming?
I advanced gently and leaned over the balustrade. My eyes were met at
first by the darkness above me, where, like gigantic spiders, the big
chandeliers rotated slowly, hanging from the ceiling. Only one of them was
lit, and its Murano-glass pendants, its carnations and roses, shone
opalescent in the light of the guttering wax. This chandelier lighted up
the opposite wall and that piece of ceiling with the goddess and the green
peacock; it illumined, but far less well, a corner of the huge room, where,
in the shadow of a kind of canopy, a little group of people were crowding
round a yellow satin sofa, of the same kind as those that lined the walls.
On the sofa, half-screened from me by the surrounding persons, a woman was
stretched out: the silver of her embroidered dress and the rays of her
diamonds gleamed and shot forth as she moved uneasily. And immediately
under the chandelier, in the full light, a man stooped over a harpsichord,
his head bent slightly, as if collecting his thoughts before singing.
He struck a few chords and sang. Yes, sure enough, it was the voice, the
voice that had so long been persecuting me! I recognised at once that
delicate, voluptuous quality, strange, exquisite, sweet beyond words, but
lacking all youth and clearness. That passion veiled in tears which had
troubled my brain that night on the lagoon, and again on the Grand Canal
singing the Biondina, and yet again, only two days
since, in the deserted cathedral of Padua. But I recognised now what seemed
to have been hidden from me till then, that this voice was what I cared
most for in all the wide world.
The voice wound and unwound itself in long, languishing phrases, in
rich, voluptuous rifiorituras, all fretted with
tiny scales and exquisite, crisp shakes; it stopped ever and anon, swaying
as if panting in languid delight. And I felt my body melt even as wax in
the sunshine, and it seemed to me that I too was turning fluid and
vaporous, in order to mingle with these sounds as the moonbeams mingle with
the dew.
Suddenly, from the dimly lighted corner by the canopy, came a little
piteous wail; then another followed, and was lost in the singer's
voice. During a long phrase on the harpsichord, sharp and tinkling, the
singer turned his head towards the dais, and there came a plaintive little
sob. But he, instead of stopping, struck a sharp chord; and with a thread
of voice so hushed as to be
scarcely audible, slid softly into a long cadenza. At the same moment he threw his head backwards, and the light fell full upon the handsome, effeminate face, with its ashy pallor and big, black brows, of the singer Zaffirino. At the sight of that face, sensual and sullen, of that smile which was cruel and mocking like a bad woman's, I understood--I knew not why, by what process--that his singing must be cut short, that the accursed phrase must never be finished. I understood that I was before an assassin, that he was killing this woman, and killing me also, with his wicked voice.
I rushed down the narrow stair which led down from the box, pursued, as
it were, by that exquisite voice, swelling, swelling by insensible degrees.
I flung myself on the door which must be that of the big saloon. I could
see its light between the panels. I bruised my hands in trying to wrench
the latch. The door was fastened tight, and while I was struggling with
that locked door I heard the voice swelling, swelling, rending asunder that
downy veil which wrapped it, leaping forth clear, resplendent, like the
sharp and glittering blade of a knife that seemed to enter deep into my
breast. Then, once more, a wail, a death-groan, and that dreadful noise,
that hideous gurgle of breath strangled by a rush of blood. And then a long
shake, acute, brilliant, triumphant.
The door gave way beneath my weight, one half crashed in. I entered. I
was blinded by a flood
of blue moonlight. It poured in through four great windows, peaceful and diaphanous, a pale blue mist of moonlight, and turned the huge room into a kind of submarine cave, paved with moonbeams, full of shimmers, of pools of moonlight. It was as bright as at midday, but the brightness was cold, blue, vaporous, supernatural. The room was completely empty, like a great hay-loft. Only, there hung from the ceiling the ropes which had once supported a chandelier; and in a corner, among stacks of wood and heaps of Indian-corn, whence spread a sickly smell of damp and mildew, there stood a long, thin harpsichord, with spindle-legs, and its cover cracked from end to end.
I felt, all of a sudden, very calm. The one thing that mattered was the
phrase that kept moving in my head, the phrase of that unfinished cadence
which I had heard but an instant before. I opened the harpsichord, and my
fingers came down boldly upon its keys. A jingle-jangle of broken strings,
laughable and dreadful, was the only answer.
Then an extraordinary fear overtook me. I clambered out of one of the
windows; I rushed up the garden and wandered through the fields, among the
canals and the embankments, until the moon had set and the dawn began to
shiver, followed, pursued for ever by that jangle of broken strings.
People expressed much satisfaction at my recovery. It seems that one
dies of those fevers.
Recovery? But have I recovered? I walk, and eat and drink and talk; I
can even sleep. I live the life of other living creatures. But I am wasted
by a strange and deadly disease. I can never lay hold of my own
inspiration. My head is filled with music which is certainly by me, since I
have never heard it before, but which still is not my own, which I despise
and abhor: little, tripping flourishes and languishing phrases, and
long-drawn, echoing cadences.
O wicked, wicked voice, violin of flesh and blood made by the Evil
One's hand, may I not even execrate thee in peace; but is it necessary
that, at the moment when I curse, the longing to hear thee again should
parch my soul like hell-thirst? And since I have satiated thy lust for
revenge, since thou hast withered my life and withered my genius, is it not
time for pity? May I not hear one note, only one note of thine, O singer, O
wicked and contemptible wretch?
THE END.
PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND
LONDON.