Part 16

The Swiss, flourishing his staff of office, marshalled me (I can’t use a less imposing word for the ceremony) slowly, solemnly, across a courtyard, and up a great stone staircase, at the top of which he handed me on to a functionary in black—a functionary with an ominously austere countenance, like an usher to the Inquisition. Poor old Archimede! Later, when I had come to know him well and tip him, I found he was the mildest creature, the amiablest, the most obliging, and that tenebrious mien of his only a congenital accident, like a lisp or a club-foot. But for the present he dismayed me, and I surrendered myself with humility and meekness to his guardianship. He conducted me through a series of vast chambers—you know those enormous, ungenial Roman rooms, their sombre tapestried walls, their formal furniture, their cheerless, perpetual twilight—and out upon a terrace.

The terrace lay in full sunshine. There was a garden below it, a garden with orange-trees, and rosebushes, and camellias, with stretches of greensward, with shrubberies, with a great fountain plashing in the midst of it, and broken, moss-grown statues: a Roman garden, from which a hundred sweet airs came up, in the gentle Roman weather. The balustrade of the terrace was set at intervals with flowering plants, in big urn-shaped vases; I don’t remember what the flowers were, but they were pink, and many of their petals had fallen, and lay scattered on the grey terrace pavement. At the far end, under an awning brave with red and yellow stripes, two ladies were seated—a lady in black, presumably the object of my pious pilgrimage; and a lady in white, whom, even from a distance, I discovered to be young and pretty. A little round table stood between them, with a carafe of water and some tumblers glistening crisply on it. The lady in black was fanning herself with a black lace fan. The lady in white held a book in her hand, from which I think she had been reading aloud. A tiny imp of a red Pomeranian dog had started forward, and was barking furiously.

This scene must have made a deeper impression upon my perceptions than any that I was conscious of at the moment, because it has always remained as fresh in my memory as you see it now. It has always been a picture that I could turn to when I would, and find unfaded: the garden, the blue sky, the warm September sunshine, the long terrace, and the two ladies seated at the end of it, looking towards me, an elderly lady in black, and a young lady in white, with dark hair.

My aunt quieted Sandro (that was the dog’s name), and giving me her hand, said “How do you do?” rather drily. And then, for what seemed a terribly long time, though no doubt it was only a few seconds, she kept me standing before her, while she scrutinised me through a double eye-glass, which she held by a mother-of-pearl handle; and I was acutely aware of the awkward figure I must be cutting to the vision of that strange young lady.

At last, “I should never have recognised you. As a child you were the image of your father. Now you resemble your mother,” Aunt Elizabeth declared; and lowering her glass, she added, “This is your cousin Rosalys.”

I wondered, as I made my bow, why I had never heard before that I had such a pretty cousin, with such a pretty name. She smiled on me very kindly, and I noticed how bright her eyes were, and how white and delicate her face. The little blue veins showed through the skin, and there was no more than just the palest, palest thought of colour in her cheeks. But her lips—exquisitely curved, sensitive lips—were warm red. She smiled on me very kindly, and I daresay my heart responded with an instant palpitation. She was a girl, and she was pretty; and her name was Rosalys; and we were cousins; and I was eighteen. And above us glowed the blue sky of Italy, and round us the golden sunshine; and there, beside the terrace, lay the beautiful old Roman garden, the fragrant, romantic garden.... If at eighteen one isn’t susceptible and sentimental and impetuous, and prepared to respond with an instant sweet commotion to the smiles of one’s pretty cousins (especially when they’re named Rosalys), I protest one is unworthy of one’s youth. One might as well be thirty-five, and a literary hack in London.

After that introduction, however, my aunt immediately reclaimed my attention. She proceeded to ask me all sorts of questions, about myself, about my people, uninteresting questions, disconcerting questions, which she posed with the air of one who knew the answers beforehand, and was only asking as an examiner asks, to test you. And all the while, the expression of her face, of her deprecating straight-lipped mouth, of her half-closed sceptical old eyes, seemed to imply that she already had her opinion of me, and that it wouldn’t in the least be affected by anything I could say for myself, and that it was distinctly not a flattering opinion.

“Well, and what brings you to Rome?” That was one of her questions. I felt like a suspicious character haled before the local magistrate to give an account of his presence in the parish; putting on the best face I could, I pleaded superior orders. I had taken my baccalauréat in the summer; and my father desired me to pass some months in Italy, for the purpose of “patching up my Italian, which had suffered from the ravages of time,” before I returned to Paris, and settled down to the study of a profession.

“H’m,” said she, manifesting no emotion at what (in my simplicity) I deemed rather a felicitous metaphor; and then, as it were, she let me off with a warning. “Look out that you don’t fall into bad company. Rome is full of dangerous people—painters, Bohemians, republicans, atheists. You must be careful. I shall keep my eye upon you.”

By-and-by, to my relief, my aunt’s director arrived, Monsignor Parlaghi, a tall, fat, cheerful, bustling man, who wore a silk cassock edged with purple, and a purple netted sash. When he sat down and crossed his legs, one saw a square-toed shoe with a silver buckle, and an inch or two of purple silk stocking. He began at once to talk with his penitent, about some matter to which I (happily) was a stranger; and that gave me my chance to break the ice with Rosalys.

She had risen to greet the Monsignore, and now stood by the balustrade of the terrace, half turned towards the garden, a slender, fragile figure, all in white. Her dark hair swept away from her forehead in lovely, long undulations, and her white face, beneath it, seemed almost spirit-like in its delicacy, almost immaterial.

“I am richer than I thought. I did not know I had a Cousin Rosalys,” said I.

It looks like a sufficiently easy thing to say, doesn’t it? And besides, hadn’t I carefully composed and corrected and conned it beforehand in the silence of my mind? But I remember the mighty effort of will it cost me to get it said. I suppose it is in the design of nature that Eighteen should find it nervous work to break the ice with pretty girls. At any rate, I remember how my heart fluttered, and what a hollow, unfamiliar sound my voice had; I remember that in the very middle of the enterprise my pluck and my presence of mind suddenly deserted me, and everything became a blank, and for one horrible moment I thought I was going to break down utterly, and stand there staring, blushing, speechless. But then I made a further mighty effort of will, a desperate effort, and somehow, though they nearly choked me, the premeditated words came out.

“Oh, we’re not real cousins,” said she, letting her eyes shine for a second on my face. And she explained to me just what the connection between us was. “But we will call ourselves cousins,” she concluded.

The worst was over; the worst, though Eighteen was still, no doubt, conscious of perturbations. I don’t know how long we stood chatting together there by the balustrade, but presently I said something about the garden, and she proposed that we should go down into it. So she led me to the other end of the terrace, where there was a flight of steps, and we went down into the garden.

The merest trifles, in such weather, with a pretty new-found Cousin Rosalys for a comrade, are delightful, when one is eighteen, aren’t they? It was delightful to feel the yielding turf under our feet, the cool grass curling round our ankles—for in Roman gardens, in those old days, it wasn’t the fashion to clip the grass close, as on an English lawn. It was delightful to walk in the shade of the orange-trees, and breathe the air sweetened by them. The stillness the dreamy stillness of the soft, sunny afternoon was delightful; the crumbling old statues were delightful, statues of fauns and dryads, of Pagan gods and goddesses, Pan and Bacchus and Diana, their noses broken for the most part, their bodies clothed in mosses and leafy vines. And the flowers were delightful; the cyclamens, with which—so abundant were they—the walls of the garden fairly dripped, as with a kind of pink foam; and the roses, and the waxen red and white camellias. It was delightful to stop before the great brown old fountain, and listen to its tinkle-tinkle of cold water, and peer into its basin, all green with weeds, and watch the antics of the goldfishes, and the little rainbows the sun struck from the spray. And my Cousin Rosalys’s white frock was delightful, and her voice was delightful; and that perturbation in my heart was exquisitely delightful—something between a thrill and a tremor—a delicious mixture of fear and wonderment and beatitude. I had dragged myself hither to pay a duty-call upon my grim old dragon of a great-aunt Elizabeth; and here I was wandering amid the hundred delights of a romantic Italian garden, with a lovely, white-robed, bright-eyed sylph of a Cousin Rosalys.

Don’t ask me what we talked about. I have only the most fragmentary recollection. I remember she told me that her father and mother had died in India, when she was a child, and that her father (Aunt Elizabeth’s “ever so much younger brother”) had been in the army, and that she had lived with Aunt Elizabeth since she was twelve. And I remember she asked me to speak French with her, because in Rome she almost always spoke Italian or English, and she didn’t want to forget her French; and “You’re, of course, almost a Frenchman, living in Paris.” So we spoke French together, saying ma cousine and mon cousin, which was very intimate and pleasant; and she spoke it so well that I expressed some surprise. “If you don’t put on at least a slight accent, I shall tell you you’re almost a Frenchman too,” I threatened. “Oh, I had French nurses when I was little,” she said, “and afterwards a French governess, till I was sixteen. I’m eighteen now. How old are you?” I had heard that girls always liked a man to be older than themselves, and I answered that I was nearly twenty. Well, and isn’t eighteen nearly twenty?.... Anyhow, as I walked back to my lodgings that afternoon, through the busy, twisted, sunlit Roman streets, Cousin Rosalys filled all my heart and all my thoughts with a white radiance.

You will conceive whether or not, during the months that followed, I was an assiduous visitor at the Palazzo Zacchinelli. But I couldn’t spend all my time there, and in my enforced absences I needed consolation. I imagine I treated Aunt Elizabeth’s advice about avoiding bad company as youth is wont to treat the counsels of crabbed age. Doubtless my most frequent associates were those very painters and Bohemians against whom she had particularly cautioned me—whether they were also republicans and atheists, I don’t think I ever knew; I can’t remember that I inquired, and religion and politics were subjects they seldom touched upon spontaneously. I dare say I joined the artists’ club, in the Via Margutta, the Circolo Internazionale degli Artisti; I am afraid the Caffe Greco was my favourite café; I am afraid I even bought a wide-awake hat, and wore it on the back of my head, and tried to look as much like a painter and Bohemian myself as nature would permit.

Bad company? I don’t know. It seemed to me very good company indeed. There was Jack Everett, tall and slim and athletic, with his eager aquiline face, his dark curling hair, the most poetic-looking creature, humorous, whimsical, melancholy, imaginative, who used to quote Byron, and plan our best practical jokes, and do the loveliest little cupids and roses in water-colours. He has since married the girl he was even then in love with, and is still living in Rome, and painting cupids and roses. And there was d’.vignac, le vicomte, a young Frenchman, who had been in the Diplomatic Service, and—superlative distinction!—“ruined himself for a woman,” and now was striving to keep body and soul together by giving fencing lessons; witty, kindly, pathetic d’.vignac—we have vanished altogether from each other’s ken. There was Ulysse Tavoni, the musician, who, when somebody asked him what instrument he played, answered cheerily, “All instruments.” I can testify from personal observation that he played the piano and the flute, the guitar, mandoline, fiddle, and French horn, the ’cello and the zither. And there was Kônig, the Austrian sculptor, a tiny man with a ferocious black moustache, whom my landlady (he having called upon me one day when I was out), unable to remember his transalpine name, described to perfection as “un Orlando Furioso—ma molto piccolo.” There was a dear, dreamy, languid, sentimental Pole, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, also a sculptor, whose name I have totally forgotten, though we were sworn to “hearts’ brotherhood,” He had the most astonishing talent for imitating the sounds of animals, the neighing of a horse, the crowing of a cock; and when he brayed like a donkey, all the donkeys within earshot were deceived, and answered him. And then there was Father Flynn, a jolly old bibulous priest from Cork. An uncle of his had fought at Waterloo; it was great to hear him tell of his uncle’s part in the fortunes of the day. It was great, too (for Father Flynn was a fervid Irish patriot), to hear him roar out the “Wearing of the Green.” Between the stanzas he would brandish his blackthorn, stick at Everett, and call him a “murthering English tyrant,” to our huge delectation.

There were others and others and others; but these six are those who come back first to my memory. They seemed to me very good company indeed; very merry, and genial, and amusing; and the life we led together seemed a very pleasant life. Oh, our pleasures were of the simplest nature, the traditional pleasures of Bohemia; smoking and drinking and talking, rambling arm-in-arm through the streets, lounging in studios, going to the play or perhaps the circus, or making excursions into the country. Only, the capital of our Bohemia was Rome. The streets through which we rambled were Roman streets, with their inexhaustible picturesqueness, their unending vicissitudes: with their pink and yellow houses, their shrines, their fountains, their gardens, their motley wayfarers—monks and soldiers; shaggy pifferari, and contadine in their gaudy costumes, and models masquerading as contadine; penitents, beggars, water-carriers, hawkers; priests in their vestments, bearing the Host, attended by acolytes, with burning tapers, who rang little bells, whilst men uncovered and women crossed themselves; and everywhere, everywhere, English tourists, with their noses in Baedeker. It was Rome with its bright sun, and its deep shadows; with its Ghetto, its Tiber, its Castel Sant’ Angelo; with its churches, and palaces, and ruins; with its Villa Borghese and its Pincian Hill; with its waving green Campagna at its gates. We smoked and talked and drank—Chianti, of course, and sunny Orvieto, and fabled Est-Est-Est, all in those delightful pear-shaped, wicker-covered flasks, which of themselves, I fancy, would confer a flavour upon indifferent wine. We made excursions to Tivoli and Frascati, to Monte Cavo and Nemi, to Acqua Acetosa. We patronised Pulcinella, and the marionettes, and (better still) the imitation marionettes. We blew horns on the night of Epiphany, we danced at masked balls, we put on dominoes and romped in the Corso during carnival, throwing flowers and confetti, and struggling to extinguish other people’s moccoli. And on rainy days (with an effort I can remember that there were some rainy days) Everett and I would sit with d’.vignac in his fencing gallery, and talk and smoke, and smoke and talk and talk. D’.vignac was six-and-twenty, Everett was twenty-two, and I was “nearly twenty.” D’.vignac would tell us of his past, of his adventures in Spain and Japan and South America, and of the lady for the love of whom he had come to grief. Everett and I would sigh profoundly, and shake our heads, and exchange sympathetic glances, and assure him that we knew what love was—we were victims of unfortunate attachments ourselves. To each other we had confided everything, Everett and I. He had told me all about his unrequited passion for Maud Eaton, and I had rhapsodised to him by the hour about Cousin Rosalys. “But you, old chap, you’re to be envied,” he would cry. “Here you are in the same town with her, by Jove! You can see her, you can plead your cause. Think of that. I wish I had half your luck. Maud is far away in England, buried in a country-house down in Lancashire. She might as well be on another planet, for all the good I get of her. But you—why, you can see your Cousin Rosalys this very hour if you like! Oh, heavens, what wouldn’t I give for half your luck!” The wheel of Time, the wheel of Time! Everett and Maud are married, but Cousin Rosalys and I.... Heigh-ho! I wonder whether, in our thoughts of ancient days, it is more what we remember or what we forget that makes them sweet? Anyhow, for the moment, we forget the dismal things that have happened since.

Yes, I was in the same town with her, by Jove; I could see her. And indeed I did see her many times every week. Like the villain in a melodrama, I led a double life. When I was not disguised as a Bohemian, in a velvet jacket and a wide-awake, smoking and talking and holding wassail with my boon companions, you might have observed a young man attired in the height of the prevailing fashion (his top-hat and varnished boots flashing fire in the eyes of the Roman populace), going to call on his Aunt Elizabeth. And his Aunt Elizabeth, pleased by such dutiful attentions, rewarded him with frequent invitations to dinner. Her other guests would be old ladies like herself, and old gentlemen, and priests, priests, priests. So that Rosalys and I, the only young ones present, were naturally paired together. After dinner Rosalys would play and sing, while I hung over her piano. Oh, how beautifully she played Chopin! How ravishingly she sang! Schubert’s Wohin, and Rôslein, Rôslein, Rôslein roth; and Gounod’s Sérénade and his Barcarolle:

“Dites la jeune belle,

Où voulez-vous aller?”

And how angelically beautiful she looked! Her delicate, pale face, and her dark, undulating hair, and her soft red lips; and then her eyes—her luminous, mysterious dark eyes, in whose depths, far, far within, you could discern her spirit shining starlike. And her hands, white and slender and graceful, images in miniature of herself; with what incommunicable wonder and admiration I used to watch them as they moved above the keys. “A woman who plays Chopin ought to have three hands—two to play with, and one for the man who’s listening to hold.” That was a pleasantry which I meditated much in secret, and a thousand times aspired to murmur in the player’s ear, but invariably, when it came to the point of doing so, my courage failed me. “You can see her, you can plead your cause.” Bless me, I never dared even vaguely to hint that I had any cause to plead. I imagine young love is always terribly afraid of revealing itself to its object, terribly afraid and terribly desirous. Whenever I was not in Cousin Rosalys’s presence, my heart was consumed with longing to tell her that I loved her, to ask her whether perhaps she might be not wholly indifferent to me; I made the boldest resolutions, committed to memory the most persuasive declarations. But from the instant I was in her presence again—mercy, what panic seized me!

I could have died sooner than speak the words that I was dying to speak, ask the question I was dying to ask.

I called assiduously at the Palazzo Zacchinelli, and my aunt bade me to dinner a good deal, and then one afternoon every week she used to drive with Rosalys on the Pincian. There was one afternoon every week when all Rome drove on the Pincian; was it Saturday? At any rate, you may be very sure I did not let such opportunities escape me for getting a bow and a smile from my cousin. Sometimes she would leave the carriage and join me, while Aunt Elizabeth, with Sandro in her lap, drove on, round and round the consecrated circle; and we would stroll together in the winding alleys, or stand by the terrace and look off over the roofs of the city, and watch the sunset blaze and fade behind St. Peter’s. You know that unexampled view—the roofs of Rome spread out beneath you like the surface of a troubled sea, and the dome of St. Peter’s, an island rising in the distance, and the sunset sky behind it. We would stand there in silence perhaps, at most saying very little, while the sunset burned itself out; and for one of us, at least, it was a moment of ineffable, impossible enchantment. She was so near to me—so near, the slender figure in the pretty frock, with the dark hair, and the captivating hat, and the furs; with her soft glowing eyes, with her exquisite fragrance of girlhood; she was so near to me, so alone with me, despite the crowd about us, and I loved her so! Oh, why couldn’t I tell her? Why couldn’t she divine it? People said that women always knew by intuition when men were in love with them. Why couldn’t Rosalys divine that I loved her, how I loved her, and make me a sign, and so enable me to speak?

Presently—and all too soon—she would return to the carriage, and drive away with Aunt Elizabeth; and I, in the lugubrious twilight, would descend the great marble Spanish staircase (a perilous path, amongst models and beggars and other things) to the Piazza, and seek out Jack Everett at the Caffé Greco. Thence he and I would go off to dine together somewhere, condoling with each other upon our ill-starred passions. After dinner, pulling our hats over our eyes, two desperately tragic forms, we would set ourselves upon the traces of d’.vignac and Kônig and Father Flynn, determined to forget our sorrows in an evening of dissipation, saying regretfully, “These are the evil courses to which the love of woman has reduced us—a couple of the best-meaning fellows in Christendom, and surely born for better ends.” When we were children (hasn’t Kenneth Grahame written it for us in a golden book?) we played at conspirators and pirates. When we were a little older, and Byron or Musset had superseded Fenimore Cooper, some of us found there was an unique excitement to be got from the game of Blighted Beings.

Oh, why couldn’t I tell her? Why couldn’t she divine it, and make me an encouraging sign?

But, of course, in the end I did tell her. It was on the night of my birthday. I had dined at the Palazzo Zacchinelli, and with the dessert a great cake was brought in and set before me. A number of little red candles were burning round it, and embossed upon it in frosting was this device:

A birthday-piece

From Rosalys,

Wishing birthdays more in plenty

To her cousin “nearly twenty.”

And counting the candles, I perceived they were nineteen.