Chapter 25
Then from the campaign of '59 he fell back on the Five Days of Milan in '48--the immortal days, when a populace drove out an army, and what began almost in jest ended in a delirium, a stupefaction of victory. His language was hot, broken, confused, like the street fighting it chronicled. Afterwards--a further sharpening and blanching of the old face--and he had carried them deep into the black years of Italy's patience and Austria's revenge. Throwing out a thin arm, he pointed towards town after town on the lake shores, now in the brilliance of sunset, now in the shadow of the northern slope--Gravedona, Varenna, Argegno--towns which had each of them given their sons to the Austrian bullet and the Austrian lash for the ransom of Italy.
He ran through the sacred names--Stazzonelli, Riccini, Crescieri, Ronchetti, Ceresa, Previtali--young men, almost all of them, shot for the possession of a gun or a knife, for helping their comrades in the Austrian army to desert, for "insulting conduct" towards an Austrian soldier or officer.
Of one of these executions, which he had himself witnessed at Varese--the shooting of a young fellow of six-and-twenty, his own friend and kinsman--he gave an account which blanched the Duchess's cheeks and brought the big tears into her eyes. Then, when he saw the effect he had produced, the old man trembled.
"Ah, eccellenza," he cried, "but it had to be! The Italians had to show they knew how to die; then God let them live. Ecco, eccellenza!"
And he drew from his breast-pocket, with shaking hands, an old envelope tied round with string. When he had untied it, a piece of paper emerged, brown with age and worn with much reading. It was a rudely printed broadsheet containing an account of the last words and sufferings of the martyrs of Mantua--those conspirators of 1852--from whose graves and dungeons sprang, tenfold renewed, the regenerating and liberating forces which, but a few years later, drove out the Austrian with the Bourbon, together.
"See here, eccellenza," he said, as he tenderly spread out its tattered folds and gave it into the Duchess's hand. "Have the goodness to look where is that black mark. There you will find the last words of Don Enrico Tazzoli, the half-brother of my father. He was a priest, eccellenza. Ah, it was not then as it is now! The priests were then for Italy. They hanged three of them at Mantua alone. As for Don Enrico, first they stripped him of his priesthood, and then they hanged him. And those were his last words, and the last words of Scarsellini also, who suffered with him. _Veda eccellenza_! As for me, I know them from a boy."
And while the Duchess read, the old man repeated tags and fragments under his breath, as he once more resumed the oars and drove the boat gently towards Menaggio.
"_The multitude of victims has not robbed us of courage in the past, nor will it so rob us in the future--till victory dawns. The cause of the people is like the cause of religion--it triumphs only through its martyrs.... You--who survive--will conquer, and in your victory we, the dead, shall live_....
"_Take no thought for us; the blood of the forerunners is like the seed which the wise husbandman scatters on the fertile ground_.... _Teach our young men how to adore and how to suffer for a great idea. Work incessantly at that; so shall our country come to birth; and grieve not for us!... Yes, Italy shall be one! To that all things point._ WORK! _There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome, no opposition that cannot be destroyed. The_ HOW _and the_ WHEN _only remain to be solved. You, more fortunate than we, will find the clew to the riddle, when all things are accomplished, and the times are ripe.... Hope!--my parents, and my brothers--hope always!--waste no time in weeping_."
The Duchess read aloud the Italian, and Julie stooped over her shoulder to follow the words.
"Marvellous!" said Julie, in a low voice, as she sank back into her place. "A youth of twenty-seven, with the rope round his neck, and he comforts himself with 'Italy.' What's 'Italy' to him, or he to 'Italy'?" Not even an immediate paradise. "Is there anybody capable of it now?"
Her face and attitude had lost their languor. As the Duchess returned his treasure to the old man she looked at Julie with joy. Not since her illness had there been any such sign of warmth and energy.
And, indeed, as they floated on, past the glow of Bellaggio, towards the broad gold and azure of the farther lake, the world-defying passion that breathed from these words of dead and murdered Italians played as a bracing and renewing power on Julie's still feeble being. It was akin to the high snows on those far Alps that closed in the lake--to the pure wind that blew from them--to the "gleam, the shadow, and the peace supreme," amid which their little boat pressed on towards the shore.
"What matter," cried the intelligence, but as though through sobs--"what matter the individual struggle and misery? These can be lived down. The heart can be silenced--nerves steadied--strength restored. Will and idea remain--the eternal spectacle of the world, and the eternal thirst of man to see, to know, to feel, to realize himself, if not in one passion, then in another. If not in love, then in patriotism--art--thought."
* * * * *
The Duchess and Julie landed presently beneath the villa of which they were the passing tenants. The Duchess mounted the double staircase where the banksia already hung in a golden curtain over the marble balustrade. Her face was thoughtful. She had to write her daily letter to the absent and reproachful Duke.
Julie parted from her with a caress, and paused awhile to watch the small figure till it mounted out of sight. Her friend had become very dear to her. A new humility, a new gratitude filled her heart. Evelyn should not sacrifice herself much longer. When she had insisted on carrying her patient abroad, Julie had neither mind nor will wherewith to resist. But now--the Duke should soon come to his own again.
She herself turned inland for that short walk by which each day she tested her returning strength. She climbed the winding road to Criante, the lovely village above Cadenabbia; then, turning to the left, she mounted a path that led to the woods which overhang the famous gardens of the Villa Carlotta.
Such a path! To the left hand, and, as it seemed, steeply beneath her feet, all earth and heaven--the wide lake, the purple mountains, the glories of a flaming sky. On the calm spaces of water lay a shimmer of crimson and gold, repeating the noble splendor of the clouds; the midgelike boats crept from shore to shore; and, midway between Bellaggio and Cadenabbia, the steam-boat, a white speck, drew a silver furrow. To her right a green hill-side--each blade of grass, each flower, each tuft of heath, enskied, transfigured, by the broad light that poured across it from the hidden west. And on the very hill-top a few scattered olives, peaches, and wild cherries scrawled upon the blue, their bare, leaning stems, their pearly whites, their golden pinks and feathery grays all in a glory of sunset that made of them things enchanted, aerial, fantastical, like a dance of Botticelli angels on the height.
And presently a sheltered bank in a green hollow, where Julie sat down to rest. But nature, in this tranquil spot, had still new pageants, new sorceries wherewith to play upon the nerves of wonder. Across the hollow a great crag clothed in still leafless chestnut-trees reared itself against the lake. The innumerable lines of stem and branch, warm brown or steely gray, were drawn sharp on silver air, while at the very summit of the rock one superb tree with branching limbs, touched with intense black, sprang high above the rest, the proud plume or ensign of the wood. Through the trunks the blaze of distant snow and the purples of craggy mountains; in front the glistening spray of peach or cherry blossom, breaking the still wintry beauty of that majestic grove. And in all the air, dropping from the heaven, spread on the hills, or shimmering on the lake, a diffusion of purest rose and deepest blue, lake and cloud and mountain each melting into the other, as though heaven and earth conspired merely to give value and relief to the year's new birth, to this near sparkle of young leaf and blossom which shone like points of fire on the deep breast of the distance.
On the green ledge which ran round the hollow were children tugging at a goat. Opposite was a _contadino's_ house of gray stone. A water-wheel turned beside it, and a stream, brought down from the hills, ran chattering past, a white and dancing thread of water. Everything was very still and soft. The children and the river made their voices heard; and there were nightingales singing in the woods below. Otherwise all was quiet. With a tranquil and stealthy joy the spring was taking possession. Nay--the Angelus! It swung over the lake and rolled from village to village....
The tears were in Julie's eyes. Such beauty as this was apt now to crush and break her. All her being was still sore, and this appeal of nature was sometimes more than she could bear.
Only a few short weeks since Warkworth had gone out of her life--since Delafield at a stroke had saved her from ruin--since Lord Lackington had passed away.
One letter had reached her from Warkworth, a wild and incoherent letter, written at night in a little room of a squalid hotel near the Gare de Sceaux. Her telegram had reached him, and for him, as for her, all was over.
But the letter was by no means a mere cry of baffled passion. There was in it a new note of moral anguish, as fresh and startling in her ear, coming from him, as the cry of passion itself. In the language of religion, it was the utterance of a man "convicted of sin."
"How long is it since that man gave me your telegram? I was pacing up and down the departure platform, working myself into an agony of nervousness and anxiety as the time went by, wondering what on earth had happened to you, when the _chef de gare_ came up: 'Monsieur attend une dépêche?' There were some stupid formalities--at last I got it. It seemed to me I had already guessed what it contained.
"So it was _Delafield_ who met you--Delafield who turned you back?
"I saw him outside the hotel yesterday, and we exchanged a few words. I have always disliked his long, pale face and his high and mighty ways--at any rate, towards plain fellows, who don't belong to the classes, like me. Yesterday I was more than usually anxious to get rid of him.
"So he guessed?
"It can't have been chance. In some way he guessed. And you have been torn from me. My God! If I could only reach him--if I could fling his contempt in his face! And yet--
"I have been walking up and down this room all night. The longing for you has been the sharpest suffering I suppose that I have ever known. For I am not one of the many people who enjoy pain. I have kept as free of it as I could. This time it caught and gripped me. Yet that isn't all. There has been something else.
"What strange, patched creatures we are! Do you know, Julie, that by the time the dawn came I was on my knees--thanking God that we were parted--that you were on your way home--safe--out of my reach? Was I mad, or what? I can't explain it. I only know that one moment I hated Delafield as a mortal enemy--whether he was conscious of what he had done or no--and the next I found myself blessing him!
"I understand now what people mean when they talk of conversion. It seems to me that in the hours I have just passed through things have come to light in me that I myself never suspected. I came of an Evangelical stock--I was brought up in a religious household. I suppose that one can't, after all, get away from the blood and the life that one inherits. My poor, old father--I was a bad son, and I know I hastened his death--was a sort of Puritan saint, with very stern ideas. I seem to have been talking with him this night, and shrinking under his condemnation. I could see his old face, as he put before me the thoughts I had dared to entertain, the risks I had been ready to take towards the woman I loved--the woman to whom I owed a deep debt of eternal gratitude.
"Julie, it is strange how this appointment affects me. Last night I saw several people at the Embassy--good fellows--who seemed anxious to do all they could for me. Such men never took so much notice of me before. It is plain to me that this task will make or mar me. I may fail. I may die. But if I succeed England will owe me something, and these men at the top of the tree--
"Good God! how can I go on writing this to you? It's because I came back to the hotel and tossed about half the night brooding over the difference between what these men--these honorable, distinguished fellows--were prepared to think of me, and the blackguard I knew myself to be. What, take everything from a woman's hand, and then turn and try and drag her in the mire--propose to her what one would shoot a man for proposing to one's sister! Thief and cur.
"Julie--kind, beloved Julie--forget it all! For God's sake, let's cast it all behind us! As long as I live, your name, your memory will live in my heart. We shall not meet, probably, for many years. You'll marry and be happy yet. Just now I know you're suffering. I seem to see you in the train--on the steamer--your pale face that has lighted up life for me--your dear, slender hands that folded so easily into one of mine. You are in pain, my darling. Your nature is wrenched from its natural supports. And you gave me all your fine, clear mind, and all your heart. I ought to be damned to the deepest hell!
"Then, again, I say to myself, if only she were here! If only I had her _here_, with her arms round my neck, surely I might have found the courage and the mere manliness to extricate both herself and me from these entanglements. Aileen might have released and forgiven one.
"No, no! It's all over! I'll go and do my task. You set it me. You sha'n't be ashamed of me there.
"Good-bye, Julie, my love--good-bye--forever!"
These were portions of that strange document composed through the intervals of a long night, which showed in Warkworth's mind the survival of a moral code, inherited from generations of scrupulous and God-fearing ancestors, overlaid by selfish living, and now revived under the stress, the purification partly of deepening passion, partly of a high responsibility. The letter was incoherent, illogical; it showed now the meaner, now the nobler elements of character; but it was human; it came from the warm depths of life, and it had exerted in the end a composing and appeasing force upon the woman to whom it was addressed. He had loved her--if only at the moment of parting--he had loved her! At the last there had been feeling, sincerity, anguish, and to these all things may be forgiven.
And, indeed, what in her eyes there was to forgive, Julie had long forgiven. Was it his fault if, when they met first, he was already pledged--for social and practical reasons which her mind perfectly recognized and understood--to Aileen Moffatt? Was it his fault if the relations between herself and him had ripened into a friendship which in its turn could only maintain itself by passing into love? No! It was she, whose hidden, insistent passion--nourished, indeed, upon a tragic ignorance--had transformed what originally he had a perfect right to offer and to feel.
So she defended him; for in so doing she justified herself. And as to the Paris proposal, he had a right to treat her as a woman capable of deciding for herself how far love should carry her; he had a right to assume that her antecedents, her training, and her circumstances were not those of the ordinary sheltered girl, and that for her love might naturally wear a bolder and wilder aspect than for others. He blamed himself too severely, too passionately; but for this very blame her heart remembered him the more tenderly. For it meant that his mind was torn and in travail for her, that his thoughts clung to her in a passionate remorse; and again she felt herself loved, and forgave with all her heart.
All the same, he was gone out of her life, and through the strain and the unconscious progress to other planes and phases of being, wrought by sickness and convalescence, her own passion for him even was now a changed and blunted thing.
Was she ashamed of the wild impulse which had carried her to Paris? It is difficult to say. She was often seized with the shuddering consciousness of an abyss escaped, with wonder that she was still in the normal, accepted world, that Evelyn might still be her companion, that Thérèse still adored her more fervently than any saint in the calendar. Perhaps, if the truth were known, she was more abased in her own eyes by the self-abandonment which had preceded the assignation with Warkworth. She had much intellectual arrogance, and before her acquaintance with Warkworth she had been accustomed to say and to feel that love was but one passion among many, and to despise those who gave it too great a place. And here she had flung herself into it, like any dull or foolish girl for whom a love affair represents the only stirring in the pool of life that she is ever likely to know.
Well, she must recapture herself and remake her life. As she sat there in the still Italian evening she thought of the old boatman, and those social and intellectual passions to which his burst of patriotism had recalled her thoughts. Society, literature, friends, and the ambitions to which these lead--let her go back to them and build her days afresh. Dr. Meredith was coming. In his talk and companionship she would once more dip and temper the tools of mind and taste. No more vain self-arraignment, no more useless regrets. She looked back with bitterness upon a moment of weakness when, in the first stage of convalescence, in mortal weariness and loneliness, she had slipped one evening into the Farm Street church and unburdened her heart in confession. As she had told the Duchess, the Catholicism instilled into her youth by the Bruges nuns still laid upon her at times its ghostly and compelling hand. Now in her renewed strength she was inclined to look upon it as an element of weakness and disintegration in her nature. She resolved, in future, to free herself more entirely from a useless _Aberglaube_.
But Meredith was not the only visitor expected at the villa in the next few days. She was already schooling herself to face the arrival of Jacob Delafield.
It was curious how the mere thought of Delafield produced an agitation, a shock of feeling, which seemed to spread through all the activities of being. The faint, renascent glamour which had begun to attach to literature and social life disappeared. She fell into a kind of brooding, the sombre restlessness of one who feels in the dark the recurrent presence of an attacking and pursuing power, and is in a tremulous uncertainty where or how to meet it.
The obscure tumult within her represented, in fact, a collision between the pagan and Christian conceptions of life. In self-dependence, in personal pride, in her desire to refer all things to the arbitrament of reason, Julie, whatever her practice, was theoretically a stoic and a pagan. But Delafield's personality embodied another "must," another "ought," of a totally different kind. And it was a "must" which, in a great crisis of her life, she also had been forced to obey. There was the thought which stung and humiliated. And the fact was irreparable; nor did she see how she was ever to escape from the strange, silent, penetrating relation it had established between her and the man who loved her and had saved her, against her will.
During her convalescence at Crowborough House, Delafield had been often admitted. It would have been impossible to exclude him, unless she had confided the whole story of the Paris journey to the Duchess. And whatever Evelyn might tremblingly guess, from Julie's own mouth she knew nothing. So Delafield had come and gone, bringing Lord Lackington's last words, and the account of his funeral, or acting as intermediary in business matters between Julie and the Chantrey brothers. Julie could not remember that she had ever asked him for these services. They fell to him, as it were, by common consent, and she had been too weak to resist.
At first, whenever he entered the room, whenever he approached her, her sense of anger and resentment had been almost unbearable. But little by little his courtesy, tact, and coolness had restored a relation between them which, if not the old one, had still many of the outward characters of intimacy. Not a word, not the remotest allusion reminded her of what had happened. The man who had stood before her transfigured on the deck of the steamer, stammering out, "I thank God I had the courage to do it!"--it was often hard for her to believe, as she stole a look at Delafield, chatting or writing in the Duchess's drawing-room, that such a scene had ever taken place.
* * * * *
The evening stole on. How was it that whenever she allowed the thought of Delafield to obtain a real lodgment in the mind, even the memory of Warkworth was for the time effaced? Silently, irresistibly, a wild heat of opposition would develop within her. These men round whom, as it were, there breathes an air of the heights; in whom one feels the secret guard that religion keeps over thoughts and words and acts--her passionate yet critical nature flung out against them. How are they better than others, after all? What right have they over the wills of others?
Nevertheless, as the rose of evening burned on the craggy mountain face beyond Bellaggio, retreating upward, step by step, till the last glorious summit had died into the cool and already starlit blues of night, Julie, held, as it were, by a reluctant and half-jealous fascination, sat dreaming on the hill-side, not now of Warkworth, not of the ambitions of the mind, or society, but simply of the goings and comings, the aspects and sayings of a man in whose eyes she had once read the deepest and sternest things of the soul--a condemnation and an anguish above and beyond himself.
* * * * *
Dr. Meredith arrived in due time, a jaded Londoner athirst for idleness and fresh air. The Duchess and Julie carried him hither and thither about the lake in the four-oar boat which had been hired for the Duchess's pleasure. Here, enthroned between the two ladies, he passed luxurious hours, and his talk of politics, persons, and books brought just that stimulus to Julie's intelligence and spirits for which the Duchess had been secretly longing.
A first faint color returned to Julie's cheeks. She began to talk again; to resume certain correspondences; to show herself once more--at any rate intermittently--the affectionate, sympathetic, and beguiling friend.
As for Meredith, he knew little, but he suspected a good deal. There were certain features in her illness and convalescence which suggested to him a mental cause; and if there were such a cause, it must, of course, spring from her relations to Warkworth.
The name of that young officer was never mentioned. Once or twice Meredith was tempted to introduce it. It rankled in his mind that Julie had never been frank with him, freely as he had poured his affection at her feet. But a moment of languor or of pallor disarmed him.