Chapter 17

THE CARDINALESSA

One day, as I was travelling through the island by rail, I lunched in the restaurant-car and divided my attention between the colazione, the view and the other lunchers.

At the table in front of me sat three gentlemen; beyond them, at a separate table, sat a distinguished-looking lady, quietly but well dressed in foamy white musliny stuff, with a good deal of lace and a few touches of pale green. She had a lovely hat and a veil, which she wore in such a way that I thought how well she would look in a motor-car. She did not appear to be much over thirty, and she was alone except that she had a little dog, whom she fed from her plate and who was evidently very fond of her. She was not strictly beautiful, her face depended for its charm more on its expression than on the regularity of its features, but there was about her a certain indescribable combination of dignity and vivacity that was curiously attractive, and that soon attracted the three gentlemen, who, I presently became aware, had entered into conversation with her. Possibly they had asked the waiter to introduce them while I was looking out of the window. Certainly they cannot have met her before, because I heard them ask her her nationality, and she told them that her father was an Italian, a native of Rome, and that her mother was French. And where was she going? To some place whose name I did not catch. Then she must change at the junction. Yes, but there would be no difficulty because she was accustomed to travelling, she had travelled in China, India, Egypt and America. No doubt she was gifted by nature with that happy temperament which enables its possessor to make friends easily, and her extensive travels had provided opportunities for its cultivation. I supposed the three gentlemen to be accountants or advocates or perhaps engineers; but I thought from her manner that she would have been just as much at her ease if they had been carabinieri. I heard her tell them she was twenty-two; she must have been very young when she began her travels.

While the waiter was making out our bills, one of the gentlemen begged her to grant him a favour. She smiled in her frank open way as an encouragement to him to name it, and he declared that he should consider it an honour if she would permit him to pay for her luncheon. The lady accepted his generosity, and granted his request with a smile of such queenly condescension that I had a vision of great Elizabeth stepping upon Raleigh's cloak.

Presently this gentleman went and sat by himself at a table for two and the lady joined him. This appeared to me a little odd; he might just as well have sat at her table, or have invited her to sit at his with the other two gentlemen, there was room and it would have been less marked. But they seemed to prefer to start a little colony of their own, as it were, on neutral ground. The gentleman made another proposal: A glass of wine? With pleasure. So the waiter brought it, and then the lady accepted a cigarette.

At the junction the lady and the gentleman both got out, and I saw him help her into her train, which started first for the place whose name I had not caught. Then he got into his train, which was labelled "Castellinaria," and I went on without changing. A few days later, however, I returned to the junction, changed there and followed the accountant to Castellinaria, where I was going to see my friend Antonio, who happened to be engaged there on an engineering job. In the evening I told him about the lady in the restaurant-car. He laughed and said:

"But this lady is a particular friend of mine. She is often here, she returned two days ago and told me all this herself, only last night. If you would like to make her acquaintance I will take you to see her."

So we went to her hotel, which was not the Albergo della Madonna. She received us in her bedroom, for which she apologised charmingly--so charmingly as to make it appear the most natural thing in the world to be received by her in her bedroom. She remembered seeing me in the train, and begged me to sit down. She had a visitor--a gentleman. It was the gentleman who had paid for her luncheon in the restaurant-car. I was introduced, and he was, as I had supposed, an accountant. The lady was less elaborately clad than on the occasion of our previous meeting. Just as her other costume was precisely what it should have been for a restaurant-car, so this was precisely adapted to her present surroundings. She evidently understood dress. And very pretty it was to see her busying herself about the room, entertaining her guests and playing with her little dog. He was not the only little dog she had ever had. Her previous companion, who had been given her by a Neapolitan gentleman, died, and she wept for six weeks and was inconsolable until another friend gave her this one. She thought first of calling him Vesuvio, which was the name of his predecessor, but could not bring herself to do so. Then she had the inspiration to call him Etna, which suited him better, because he was a trifle bigger; it was also a kind of complimentary reference to her first love. While she told us this she was making coffee with a spirit lamp on the chest of drawers. She had a speciality for making coffee, and really it was quite drinkable.

She gave us the story of her life. She was the niece of a cardinal, in whose person were accumulated all the apostolic virtues, and her mother was a French lady of noble birth and almost incredible beauty, who, when Mary, or Mery as she prefers to write it, was about two months old, married the cardinal's coachman and had eleven more children. When one draws a conclusion from insufficient data, it is always satisfactory to discover, as one too seldom does, that one was right. I had been right about the gentleman being an accountant, and here I was right again in my surmise that the lady was exceptionally highly connected, so highly that one could overlook her mother's mesalliance with the coachman. Her uncle was only a bishop at the time of her birth, he became a cardinal soon after Mery's mother married the coachman, and then he forced the coachman to legitimise Mery, and in this way the coachman became Mery's legal father; and all this was part of a scheme to accelerate the ecclesiastical preferment of her uncle. Ah! but he was an ambitious man and aspired to the throne of S. Peter. His scheme failed, however, owing to the wicked intrigues of the Jesuits.

Parts of this might have borne, I do not say amplification, for it was quite long enough, but a word or two of elucidation. I have no doubt Mery would have been quite ready to explain everything, for she had nothing to conceal and the subject would have done as well as any other to display her feminine charm, but I did not interrupt, because I have observed that when a thorough woman of business undertakes to elucidate a point of law, she does it so much in the manner of Mrs. Nickleby that she not infrequently leaves it more obscure than she finds it. Mery did not expressly say she was a woman of business, she, in fact, disclaimed any such pretension, but she did it with a delightful mock modesty that forbade us to take her words literally.

No expense was spared over Mery's education. She was sent to a convent at Marseilles and the nuns were very kind to her, not because of her ecclesiastical connection, but because they were holy women with large and noble hearts. Before her education was completed, however, she was sent for to return home, and oh, what a home it was! Her mother's health had broken down because the cardinal beat her, her legal father drank instead of protecting his wife, the younger children were uncared-for and the elder children, though they were growing up, had not Mery's business capacity and powers of management. She put her shoulder to the wheel, did the marketing, the cooking and the cleaning; she washed and mended the children's clothes and saw to everything. She hated the life, but woman was born to suffer and she did her duty.

In time her next sister married a music-hall singer--I should say a dramatic artist. Mery, who was now entering upon the heyday of her youth and beauty, was naturally introduced to the friends of her sister's husband. Every man in the company fell in love with her; all the bachelors proposed, and without her natural firmness, reinforced by the teaching of the holy nuns, she could scarcely have escaped matrimony. There was another thing that helped to save her--she was waiting for her anima gemella. I may here say that her anima gemella has not yet crossed her path and that her real age is twenty-seven. She told us this in confidence and it is not to go any further. For people in restaurant-cars she is any age she thinks proper at the moment, they do not matter, but she will never deceive her friends.

Her sister's husband was a man of real insight; he divined that Mery was a heaven-inspired dancer, and devoted himself to the development of her genius. She did not say he had taught her to dance; she said he encouraged and developed her natural genius for dancing. She made her debut with a success which the newspapers declared to be even more "phenomenal" than that which attends the debut of every artist. Engagements followed, and soon she was dancing practically all over the globe, creating a furore wherever she went and leaving the younger children's socks to wash and darn themselves. Her mother was too ill and her legal father too drunk to know what she was doing or where she was doing it, but His Eminence heard and was so much scandalised that when she danced into the Eternal City the doors of the Vatican were closed to her. Cardinals are delightful men, most of them--and Mery knows because she is on terms of intimacy with every member of the College--but too frequently they have a fault; they do not understand the artistic temperament. Nevertheless, if her uncle could have heard the cheers that greeted her in Shanghai and New York, and the encores that called her back in Cairo and Calcutta, if he could have seen the flowers that choked the wheels of her carriage in St. Petersburg and the diamonds that were showered upon her in Brazil, even his commonplace heart must have been moved.

She did not dance for us because, it seems, they do not dance when they are resting, which was perhaps the psychological reason, but there was also a geographical reason in the want of space, for the room was small and contained, besides Mery and Etna in one arm-chair, another arm-chair and two ordinary chairs occupied by her visitors; also there was the chest of drawers on which she had made the coffee and all such other articles of furniture as one usually sees in a hotel bedroom, including two beds. The extra bed was there because Mery was, she confessed it, of luxurious habits and in the hot weather liked to be able to change and finish the night in a cool bed.

Here there came a pause, not that she was exhausted, but something had happened about the little dog, who required attention. When Etna's business had been settled I thought it might be tactful if I suspended the inconvenience, as they say, so I asked Antonio whether we ought not to go and we begged leave to retire. She wished us good night in her frank, open way, thanked me for my visit, inquired how long I was staying in the town and concluded with the hope that I would call again, she never went out, so I should be sure to find her at any time. It should not be Addio, it should be Arrivederci.

There are few places where I am more at home than I am in Castellinaria, but as I had come there this time expressly to see Antonio he considered it his duty to look after me; he was engaged next day, however, so he deputed two of his friends to amuse me, and they invited me to come for a drive to the lighthouse. On the way, one of them said:

"And so Antonio took you yesterday to pass an intellectual evening with the cardinalessa."

"Yes," I replied. "What a charming woman and what a strange life!"

They agreed, somewhat coldly as it seemed to me, and they rather markedly refrained from developing the subject I had offered them; but they proposed a counter subject. In a few days it would be Mery's onomastico and they were going to send flowers. I should be in Palermo, would not I send her a message on a picture post-card? Of course I would. So between us we composed it:--

Auguri per l' onomastico. Ringraziamenti per la serata intellettuale e per il caffe. Saluti--non piu, per timore di ingelosire nostro amico Antonio.

Devotissimo suo Enrico. {183}

This was the address:--

ALL' EMINENTISSIMA CARDINALESSA, MERY SO-AND-SO, ALBERGO DELL' ALLEGRIA, CASTELLINARIA.

I chose a card with a picture of St. Peter's; this seemed more appropriate than una ballerina qualunque, which I might have had for the same money, because her onomastico was the 8th September, the birthday of the Madonna, and it was her uncle who had given her the name of Mery and had himself baptised her.

I left Castellinaria next day with the card in my pocket ready to be posted on the 7th September, and went to Palermo, where I know a young doctor. I told him all about it and showed him the post-card. When he saw Mery's real name he burst out laughing.

"Oh! that woman! Why, I know her quite well. She was here with a friend of mine, who asked me to attend her professionally--I mean in my professional capacity. Oh! nothing serious, but we had to communicate with her people and I know all about her. She is not a normal woman. Of course, that rigmarole about the cardinal is all nonsense. She is the daughter of a fisherman of Siracusa. She did dance here once for a few nights, but only at the Biondo, and no one noticed her, she was in one of the back rows of the ballet. Did they tell you why she returned to Castellinaria?"

They had said nothing about it, and my doctor, not being a friend of Antonio and therefore not bound by any ties of omerta, gave me an account of it.

It happened a few months previously: Mery was living in Palermo in a hotel, and her room had a balcony; the next balcony belonged to a room occupied by a young lady and her family, and the young lady was engaged to an officer. One day Etna strayed on to the neighbouring balcony and behaved in a manner that displeased the young lady whose betrothed complained to the proprietor and Mery was requested to leave. She, of course, saw that all this about her dog was merely a casus belli concealing a conspiracy to insult her, and indignantly refused to go. Next day, while the officer was sitting with his friends outside his usual caffe, Mery happened to pass on her way to buy a stamp and post a letter. She spoke to the officer, saying:

"You think a lot of yourself, don't you?"

The officer requested her not to address him, whereupon, taking the law into her own hands, she went up to him and made a hole in her manners by scratching his face. A crowd began to collect. Mery permitted herself the use of an expression. It was a Sicilian word, my doctor told me what it was and also its meaning; it appeared to me rather silly than offensive, but he assured me that it is never used except by people of the very lowest class. Mery then made more holes in her manners, reducing them to the condition of one of her father's fishing-nets, and was attempting to do the same with the officer's face when the crowd interfered; Mery was hissed and handed over to the police, who prepared her papers, took her to the railway station and turned her out of the town.

Incidents such as this, by showing Mery that Sicily is no longer being misgoverned by foreigners, may in time, perhaps, teach her not to distrust professional justice. They also may in time, perhaps, teach travellers not to trust to conclusions based upon insufficient data about distinguished-looking ladies in restaurant-cars.

But I sent her the post-card all the same.