Chapter 13
Marianina wept; the signore went down on his knees in a theatrical manner to him, and called him "maestro" and other big Italian names; the Frau signora, with tears in her eyes, asked permission to kiss his hand, which his modesty refused--he kissed hers instead.
"He was a great genius, a bird of God, who had amused himself by making fools of poor, innocent, humble, wandering minstrels. Oh, would he not be generous as he was great and be one of them for a few days, and take half the profits--more--whatever he liked?" etc.
And indeed they immediately saw the business side of the question, and were, to do them justice, immensely liberal in their conditions of partnership--and also most distressingly persistent, with adulations that got more and more fulsome the more he held back.
There was a long discussion. Barty had to be quite brutal at the end--told them he was not a musician, but a painter, and that nothing on earth should induce him to join them in their concert.
And finally, much crestfallen and somewhat huffed, the pair went out to post their placards all over the town, and Barty went for a bath and a long walk--suddenly feeling sad again and horribly one-eyed and maimed, and more wofully northless and homeless and friendless than ever.
Blankenberghe was already very full, and when he got back he saw the famous placards everywhere. And found his friends cooking their dinner, and was pressed to join them; and did so--producing a magnificent pasty and some hot-house grapes and two bottles of wine as a peace-offering--and was forgiven.
And after dinner they all sat on grain-sacks together in the large granary, and made music--with lady's-maids and valets and servants of the house for a most genial and appreciative audience--and had a very pleasant evening; and Barty came to the conclusion that he had mistaken his trade--that he sang devilish well, in fact; and so he did.
Whatever his technical shortcomings might be, he could make any tune sound pretty when he sang it. He had the native gift of ease, pathos, rhythm, humor, and charm--and a delightful sympathetic twang in his voice. His mother must have sung something like that; and all Paris went mad about her. No technical teaching in the world can ever match a genuine inheritance; and that's a fact.
Next morning they all bathed together, and Barty unheroically and quite obscurely saved a life.
The signore and his fat white signora went dancing out into the Sunny waves and right away seawards.
Then came Barty with an all-round shirt-collar round his neck and a white tie on, to conceal his seton, and a pair of blue spectacles for the glare. And behind him Marianina, hopping on and following as best she might. He turned round to encourage her, and she had suddenly disappeared; half uneasy, he went back a step or two, and saw her little pale-brown face gasping just beneath the surface--she had just got out of her depth.
He snatched her out, and she clung to him like a small monkey and cried dreadfully, and was sick all over him and herself. He managed to get her back on shore and washed and dried and consoled her before her people came back--and had the tact not to mention this adventure, guessing what fillips she would catch on her poor little pink nose for her stupidity. She looked her gratitude for this reticence of his in the most touching way, with her big black eyes--and had a cunning smile of delight at their common tacit understanding. Her rescuer from a watery grave did not apply for the "medaille de sauvetage"!
Barty took an immense walk that day to avoid the common repast; he was getting very tired of the two senior Veroneses.
The concert in the evening was a tremendous success. The blatant signore sang his Figaro song very well indeed--it suited him better than little feminine love-ditties. The signora was loud and passionate and dramatic in "Roberto"; and Belgians make more allowance for a German accent in French than Parisians; besides, it was not _quite_ their own language that was being murdered before, them. It _may_ be, some day! I sincerely hope so. Je leur veux du bien.
Poor little Marianina stood on her six music-books and played with immense care and earnestness, just like a frightened but well-trained poodle walking on its hind-legs--one eye on her music and the tail of the other on her father, who accompanied her with his guitar. She got an encore, to Barty's great relief; and to hers too, no doubt--if she hadn't, fillips on the nose for supper that night! Then there were more solos and duets, with obbligatos for the violin.
Next day Veronese and his wife were in high feather at the Kursaal, where they had sung the night before.
A very distinguished military foreigner, in attendance on some august personage from Spain or Portugal (and later from Ostend), warmly and publicly complimented the signore on "his admirable rendering of 'Largo al factotum'--which, as his dear old friend Rossini had once told him (the General), he (Rossini) had always modestly looked upon as the one thing he had ever written with which he was _almost_ pleased!"
Marianina also received warm commendation from this agreeable old soldier, while quite a fashionable crowd was listening; and Veronese arranged for another concert that evening, and placarded the town accordingly.
Barty managed to escape any more meals in the Casa Veronese, but took Marianina for one or two pleasant walks, and told her stories and sang to her in the grenier, while she improvised for him clever little obbligatos on her fiddle.
He found a cheap eating-house and picked up a companion or two to chat with. He also killed time with his seton-dressing and self dry-cupping--and hired French novels and read them as much as he dared with his remaining eye, about which he was morbidly nervous; he always fancied it would get its retina congested like the other, in which no improvement manifested itself whatever--and this depressed him very much. He was a most impatient patient.
To return. The second concert was as conspicuous a failure as the first had been a success: the attendance was small and less distinguished, and there was no enthusiasm. The Frau signora slipped a note and lost her temper in the middle of "Roberto," and sang out of tune and with careless, open contempt of her audience, and this the audience seemed to understand and openly resent. Poor Marianina was frightened, and played very wrong notes under the furious gaze of her papa, and finally broke down and cried, and there were some hisses for him, as well as kind and encouraging applause for the child. Then up jumps Barty and gets on the platform and takes the signore's guitar and twangs it, and smiles all round benignly--immense applause!
Then he pats Marianina's thin pale cheek and wipes her eyes and gives her a kiss. Frantic applause! Then "Fleur des Alpes!"
Ovation! encore! bis! ter!
And for a third encore he sings a very pretty little Flemish ballad about the rose without a thorn--"Het Roosje uit de Dorne." It is the only Flemish song he knows, and I hope I have spelt it right! And the audience goes quite crazy with enthusiasm, and everybody goes home happy, even the Veroneses--and Marianina does not get filliped that night.
After this the Veroneses tried humbler spheres for the display of their talents, and in less than a week exhausted every pothouse and beer-tavern and low drinking-shop in Blankenberghe! and at last they took to performing for casual coppers in the open street, and went very rapidly down hill. The signore lost his jauntiness and grew sordid and soiled and shabby and humble; the signora looked like a sulky, dirty, draggle-tailed fury, ready to break out into violence on the slightest provocation; poor Marianina got paler and thinner, and Barty was very unhappy about her. The only things left rosy about her were her bruised nose, and her fingers, that always seemed stiff with cold; indeed, they were blue rather than rosy--and anything but clean.
One evening he bought her a little warm gray cloak that took his fancy; when he went home after dinner to give it her he found the three birds of song had taken flight--sans tambour ni trompette, and leaving no message for him. The baker-landlord had turned them adrift--sent them about their business, sacrificing some of his rent to get rid of them; not a heavy loss, I fancy.
Barty went after them all over the little town, but did not find them; he heard they were last seen marching off with guitar and fiddle in a southerly direction along the coast, and found that their luggage was to be sent to Ostend.
He felt very sorry for Marianina and missed her--and gave the cloak to some poor child in the town, and was very lonely.
One morning as he loafed about dejectedly with his hands in his pockets, he found his way to the little Hotel de Ville, whence issued sounds of music. He went in. It was like a kind of reading-room and concert-room combined; there was a piano there, and a young lady practising, with her mother knitting by her side; and two or three other people, friends of theirs, lounging about and looking at the papers.
The mamma was a very handsome person of aristocratic appearance. The pretty daughter was practicing the soprano part in a duet by Campana, which Barty knew well; it was "Una sera d' amore." The tenor had apparently not kept his appointment, and madame expressed some irritation at this; first to a friend, in French, but with a slight English accent--then in English to her daughter; and Barty grew interested.
After a little while, catching the mamma's eye (which was not difficult, as she very frankly and persistently gazed at him, and with a singularly tender and wistful expression of face), he got up and asked in English if he could be of any use--seeing that he knew the music well and had often sung it. The lady was delighted, and Barty and mademoiselle sang the duet in capital style to the mamma's accompaniment: "guarda che Bianca luna," etc.
"What a lovely voice you've got! May I ask your name?" says the mamma.
"Josselin."
"English, of course?"
"Upon my word I hardly know whether I'm English or French!" said Barty, and he and the lady fell into conversation.
It turned out that she was Irish, and married to a Belgian soldier, le General Comte de Cleves (who was a tremendous swell, it seems--but just then in Brussels).
Barty told Madame de Cleves the story of his eye--he was always very communicative about his eye; and she suddenly buried her face in her hands and wept; and mademoiselle told him in a whisper that her eldest brother had gone blind and died three or four years ago, and that he was extraordinarily like Barty both in face and figure.
Presently another son of Madame de Cleves came in--an officer of dragoons in undress uniform, a splendid youth. He was the missing tenor, and made his excuses for being late, and sang very well indeed.
And Barty became the intimate friend of these good people, who made Blankenberghe a different place to him--and conceived for him a violent liking, and introduced him to all their smart Belgian friends; they were quite a set--bathing together, making music and dancing, taking excursions, and so forth. And before a fortnight was over Barty had become the most popular young man in the town, the gayest of the gay, the young guardsman once more, throwing dull care to the winds; and in spite of his impecuniosity (of which he made no secret whatever) the _boute-en-train_ of the company. And this led to many droll adventures--of which I will tell one as a sample.
A certain Belgian viscount, who had a very pretty French wife, took a dislike to Barty. He had the reputation of being a tremendous fire-eater. His wife, a light-hearted little flirt (but with not much harm in her), took a great fancy to him, on the contrary.
One day she asked him for a wax impression of the seal-ring he wore on his finger, and the following morning he sealed an empty envelope and stamped it with his ring, and handed it to her on the Plage. She snatched it with a quick gesture and slipped it into her pocket with quite a guilty little coquettish look of mutual understanding.
Monsieur Jean (as the viscount was called) noticed this, and jostled rudely against Josselin, who jostled back again and laughed.
Then the whole party walked off to the "tir," or shooting-gallery on the Plage; some wager was on, I believe, and when they got there they all began to shoot--at different distances, ladies and gentlemen; all but Barty; it was a kind of handicap.
Monsieur Jean, after a fierce and significant look at Barty, slowly raised his pistol, took a deliberate aim at the small target, and fired--hitting it just half an inch over the bull's-eye; a capital shot. Barty couldn't have done better himself. Then taking another loaded pistol, he presented it to my friend by the butt and said, with a solemn bow:
"A vous, monsieur de la garde."
"Messieurs de la garde doivent toujours tirer les premiers!" said Barty, laughing; and carelessly let off his pistol in the direction of the target without even taking aim. A little bell rang, and there was a shout of applause; and Barty was conscious that by an extraordinary fluke he had hit the bull's-eye in the middle, and saw the situation at once.
Suddenly looking very grave and very sad, he threw the pistol away, and said:
"Je ne tire plus--j'ai trop peur d'avoir la main malheureuse un jour!" and smiled benignly at M. Jean.
A moment's silence fell on the party and M. Jean turned very pale.
Barty went up to Madame Jean:
"Will you forgive me for giving you with my seal an empty envelope? I couldn't think of anything pretty enough to write you--so I gave it up. Tear it and forgive me. I'll do better next time!"
The lady blushed and pulled the letter out of her pocket and held it up to the light, and it was, as Barty said, merely an empty envelope and a red seal. She then held it out to her husband and exclaimed:
"Le cachet de Monsieur Josselin, que je lui avais demande...!"
So bloodshed was perhaps avoided, and Monsieur Jean took care not to jostle Josselin any more. Indeed, they became great friends.
For next day Barty strolled into the Salle d'Armes, Rue des Dunes--and there he found Monsieur Jean fencing with young de Cleves, the dragoon. Both were good fencers, but Barty was the finest fencer I ever met in my life, and always kept it up; and remembering his adventure of the previous day, it amused him to affect a careless nonchalance about such trivial things--"des enfantillages!"
"_You_ take a turn with Jean, Josselin!" said the dragoon.
"Oh! I'm out of practice--and I've only got one eye...."
"Je vous en prie, monsieur de la garde!" said the viscount.
"Cette fois, alors, nous allons tirer _ensemble_!" says Barty, and languidly dons the mask with an affected air, and makes a fuss about the glove not suiting him; and then, in spite of his defective sight, which seems to make no difference, he lightly and gracefully gives M. Jean such a dressing as that gentleman had never got in his life--not even from his maitre d'armes: and afterwards to young de Cleves the same. Well I knew his way of doing this kind of thing!
So Barty and M. and Madame Jean became quite intimate--and with his usual indiscretion Barty told them how he fluked that bull's-eye, and they were charmed!
"Vous etes impayable, savez-vous, mon cher!" says M. Jean--"vous avez tous les talents, et un million dans le gosier par-dessus le marche! Si jamais je puis vous etre de service, savez-vous, comptez sur moi pour la vie ..." said the impulsive viscount when they bade each other good-bye at the end.
"Et plus jamais d'enveloppes vides, quand vous m'ecrirez!" says madame.
* * * * *
So frivolous time wore on, and Barty found it pleasant to frivol in such pleasant company--very pleasant indeed! But when alone in his garret, with his seton-dressing and dry-cuppings, it was not so gay. He had to confess to himself that his eye was getting slowly worse instead of better; darkening day by day; and a little more retina had been taken in by the strange disease--"la peau de chagrin," as he nicknamed this wretched retina of his, after Balzac's famous story. He could still see with the left of it and at the bottom, but a veil had come over the middle and all the rest; by daylight he could see through this veil, but every object he saw was discolored and distorted and deformed--it was worse than darkness itself; and this was so distressing, and so interfered with the sight of the other eye, that when the sun went down, the total darkness in the ruined portion of his left retina came as a positive relief. He took all this very desperately to heart and had very terrible forebodings. For he had never known an ache or a pain, and had innocently gloried all his life in the singular perfection of his five wits.
Then his money was coming to an end; he would soon have to sing in the streets, like Veronese, with Lady Archibald's guitar.
Dear Lady Archibald! When things went wrong with her she would always laugh, and say:
"Les miseres du jour font le bonheur du lendemain!"
This he would say or sing to himself over and over again, and go to bed at night quite hopeful and sanguine after a merry day spent among his many friends; and soon sink into sleep, persuaded that his trouble was a bad dream which next morning would scatter and dispel. But when he woke, it was to find the grim reality sitting by his pillow, and he couldn't dry-cup it away. The very sunshine was an ache as he went out and got his breakfast with his blue spectacles on; and black care would link its bony arm in his as he listlessly strolled by the much-sounding sea--and cling to him close as he swam or dived; and he would wonder what he had ever done that so serious and tragic a calamity should have befallen so light a person as himself; who could only dance and sing and play the fool to make people laugh--Rigoletto--Triboulet--a mere grasshopper, no ant or bee or spider, not even a third-class beetle--surely this was not according to the eternal fitness of things!
And thus in the unutterable utterness of his dejection he would make himself such evil cheer that he sickened with envy at the mere sight of any living thing that could see out of two eyes--a homeless irresponsible dog, a hunchback beggar, a crippled organ-grinder and his monkey--till he met some acquaintance; even but a rolling fisherman with a brown face and honest blue eyes--a pair of them--and then he would forget his sorrow and his envy in chat and jokes and laughter with him over each a centime cigar; and was set up in good spirits for the day! Such was Barty Josselin, the most ready lover of his kind that ever existed, the slave of his last impression.
And thus he lived under the shadow of the sword of Damocles for many months; on and off, for years--indeed, as long as he lived at all. It is good discipline. It rids one of much superfluous self-complacency and puts a wholesome check on our keeping too good a conceit of ourselves; it prevents us from caring too meanly about mean things--too keenly about our own infinitesimal personalities; it makes us feel quick sympathy for those who live under a like condition: there are many such weapons dangling over the heads of us poor mortals by just a hair--a panoply, an armory, a very arsenal! And we grow to learn in time that when the hair gives way and the big thing falls, the blow is not half so bad as the fright had been, even if it kills us; and more often than not it is but the shadow of a sword, after all; a bogie that has kept us off many an evil track--perhaps even a blessing in disguise! And in the end, down comes some other sword from somewhere else and cuts for us the Gordian knot of our brief tangled existence, and solves the riddle and sets us free.
This is a world of surprises, where little ever happens but the unforeseen, which is seldom worth meeting halfway! And these moral reflections of mine are quite unnecessary and somewhat obvious, but they harm nobody, and are very soothing to make and utter at my time of life. Pity the sorrows of a poor old man and forgive him his maudlin garrulity....
* * * * *
One afternoon, lolling in deep dejection on the top of a little sandy hillock, a "dune," and plucking the long coarse grass, he saw a very tall elderly lady, accompanied by her maid, coming his way along the asphalt path that overlooked the sea--or rather, that prevented the sea from overlooking the land and overflowing it!
She was in deep black and wore a thick veil.
With a little jump of surprise he recognized his aunt Caroline--Lady Caroline Grey--of all his aunts the aunt who had loved him the best as a boy--whom he had loved the best.
She was a Roman Catholic, and very devout indeed--a widow, and childless now. And between her and Barty a coolness had fallen during the last few years--a heavy raw thick mist of cold estrangement; and all on account of his London life and the notoriety he had achieved there; things of which she disapproved entirely, and thought "unworthy of a gentleman": and who can blame her for thinking so?
She had at first written to him long letters of remonstrance and good advice; which he gave up answering, after a while. And when they met in society, her manner had grown chill and distant and severe.
He hadn't seen or heard of his aunt Caroline for three or four years; but at the sudden sight of her a wave of tender childish remembrance swept over him, and his heart beat quite warmly to her: affliction is a solvent of many things, and first-cousin to forgiveness.
She passed without looking his way, and he jumped up and followed her, and said:
"Oh, Aunt Caroline! won't you even speak to me?"
She started violently, and turned round, and cried: "Oh, Barty, Barty, where have you been all these years?" and seized both his hands, and shook all over.
"Oh, Barty--my beloved little Barty--take me somewhere where we can sit down and talk. I've been thinking of you very much, Barty--I've lost my poor son--he died last Christmas! I was afraid you had forgotten my existence! I was thinking of you the very moment you spoke!"
The maid left them, and she took his arm and they found a seat.
She put up her veil and looked at him: there was a great likeness between them in spite of the difference of age. She had been his father's favorite sister (some ten years younger than Lord Runswick); and she was very handsome still, though about fifty-five.
"Oh, Barty, my darling--how things have gone wrong between us! Is it _all_ my doing? Oh, I hope not!..." And she kissed him.
"How like, how like! And you're getting a little black and bulgy under the eyes--especially the left one--and so did _he_, at just about your age! And how thin you are!"
"I don't think anything need ever go wrong between us again, Aunt Caroline! I am a very altered person, and a very unlucky one!"
"Tell me, dear!"
And he told her all his story, from the fatal quarrel with her brother Lord Archibald--and the true history of that quarrel; and all that had happened since: he had nothing to keep back.
She frequently wept a little, for truth was in every tone of his voice; and when it came to the story of his lost eye, she wept very much indeed. And his need of affection, of female affection especially, and of kinship, was so immense that he clung to this most kind and loving woman as if she'd been his mother come back from the grave, or his dear Lady Archibald.