# In a Winter City/Chapter 10

CHAPTER X.
Lord Clairvaux arrived in time for Madame Mila's dinner. He was an affectionate and sunny-tempered man; he did not notice that his sister did not once say she was glad to see him.
Della Rocca did notice it, with that delicate unerring Italian perception, which is as fine as a needle and as subtle as mercury.
He saw, too, that something had come over her; some cloud; some change; she had lost much of her proud serenity, and she looked at him now and then with what seemed to him almost like contrition; she avoided being alone with him; he was troubled at it, but not alarmed; he knew very well that she loved him. He let her be.
​An Italian has infinite passion, but he has also infinite patience in matters of love. Nor was he, now that he was assured of his power over her, wholly content to use it; if he married her, the world would always say that it was for her wealth. That means of raising his own fortunes which had seemed to him so material and legitimate all his life, now seemed to him unworthy and unmanly since he had grown to care for her. He knew that such riches as she possessed were precisely those with which he had always intended to rebuild the fallen greatness of his race; but since he had loved her it looked very different.
The charm of their intercourse to him was the ascendency he had won over her, the power that he had gained to lift her nature to a higher level: where would his influence be when he had once stooped to enrich himself by its means?
These fancies saddened him and checked him, and made him not unwilling to linger on about her, in all that indistinct sweetness of half-recognised and half-unspoken love.
The position, uncertain as it was, had its ​charm; he felt that this woman, with all her insolence and indifference and absorption by the world, was, in his hands, only a creature of emotions and of passions, who would flush at his touch, and grow unnerved under his gaze; he knew that he was very dear to her since, had he not been, for the audacity of his caresses he would have been driven out of her presence.
"Ama chi t'ama, e lascia dir la gente," he said to himself in the wise burden of the people's love-song; and he let destiny go as it would.
Meanwhile, she, dissatisfied, with a conscience ill at ease, and disinclined to look into the future, saw [him morning, noon, and night, but avoided seeing him alone, and usually had her brother near.
Lord Clairvaux could only stay a week, and was utterly unconscious that his presence was unwelcome; he was taken to see the two Arab mares of Della Rocca; he was taken to Palestrina; he was taken to studios and chapels, which had no more interest for him than they would have had for a setter dog: but he was quite ignorant of why he was taken.
​He did what Lady Hilda told him to do; he always did when he and she were together; he was a simple, kindly, honest gentleman, who regarded England as the universe, and all the rest of the world as a mere accident. His sister's contempt for her country and his politics, her philosophy of indifferentism, her adoration of primitive art, her variable disdain, and her intellectual pharisaism had always seemed to him very wonderful, and not altogether comfortable; but he admired her in a hopeless kind of way, and it was not in his temper to puzzle over people's differences of opinion or character.
"Hilda thinks all the old dead fellows were gods, and she thinks all of us asses," he would say humbly. "I don't know, you know,—she's awfully clever. I never was. It may be so, only I never will believe that England is used up, as she says; and I like the east wind myself; and what she can see in those saints she's just bought, painted on their tiptoes, or in those old crooked pots;—but if she'd stayed in the country, and hunted twice a week all winter, you know she would not have been like that."
​"It would have been a great pity had Miladi been anything save what she is," said Della Rocca, to whom he expressed himself in this manner, in such French as he could command, and who was amused and astonished by him, and who took him a day's wild fowl shooting in the marshes, and a day's wild boar hunting in the next province, and wondered constantly why so kindly and gallant a gentleman should have been made by the good God so very stupid.
"Oh, you think so; I don't," said Lord Clairvaux. "Hilda isn't my idea of a happy woman. I don't believe she is happy. She spends half her life thinking how she will dress herself; and why will they dress now like the ruffs and things of Queen Elizabeth, and the effigies on the tombstones? and the other half she spends buying things she never looks at, and ordering things she dislikes when they're done, and reading books that make her think her own countrymen are a mere lot of block-heads and barbarians. Not that I pretend to understand her; I never did; only I think if ​she didn't think everybody else such a fool she'd be more comfortable."
Della Rocca smiled.
"Pardon me,—you will disturb the birds."
Lord Clairvaux recollected that he ought not to talk of his sister to a stranger, and, bringing his gun to his shoulder, fired into a covey of wild ducks.
"What a handsome fellow that is, like an old picture," he thought to himself, as he looked at Della Rocca, who sat in the prow of the boat; but he did not connect him in his thoughts with Lady Hilda in any way: for ten years he had got so tired of vainly wondering why this man and that did not please her, and had been made so vexed and perplexed by her rejection of the Prince of Deutschland, that he had ceased to think of her as a woman who could possibly ever care for anybody. One night, however, when he had been there five days, he was walked about in the crowd of the Veglione by little Madame Mila, masked, and draped as black as a little beetle; and Madame Mila, who was getting tired of things standing ​still, and could no more help putting her tiny finger into all kinds of pasties, and making mischief in a kittenish way, than she could help going on enamelling since she had once begun it, laughed at him, teazed him, and told him, what startled him.
"But she isn't here, and he is!" he gasped feebly, in protest at what he had heard, gazing over the motley crowd.
"What a goose you are;*—as if that showed anything! They can meet much better than in this place," said Madame Mila, with a saucy laugh.
He turned on her with a heavy frown.
"Hang it, Mila! you don't dare to mean———"
Madame Mila was frightened in an instant.
"Oh, dear, no; of course not; only I do assure you they've been always together ever since I've been in Floralia. I thought you knew———"
"Damn it, no!" he muttered. "I beg your pardon, I never see anything; I mean, I'm quite sure there's nothing to see."
"Well, ask her," said Madame Mila: then she added sweetly, "you know I'm so fond of dear ​Hilda; and people do talk so horridly here for nothing at all; and Italians are not so scrupulous as we are."
He went home in haste, and was told that Miladi had retired to bed fall two hours before. In the morning he sent to ask when he could see her. She sent back word that she should be happy to see him at breakfast at twelve. At ten he received a telegram from his wife asking him to return, because his eldest boy, Cheviot, was unwell, and they feared typhoid fever.
"Damn it all, what a worry!" said Lord Clairvaux to himself, and then went out and smoked on the bank of the river, and looked over the stone parapet moodily.
"Bon-jour, monsieur," a voice said, passing him.
Della Rocca was driving past with a fiery little horse on his way to Palestrina. Lord Clairvaux felt inclined to stop the horse; but what could he say if he did?
What a nuisance it was, he thought; but what could go right in a country where they shot their foxes, and called their brushes tails, and ​hung them under the ears of cart-mules and ponies?—a country where they treated the foxes as they did, to say nothing of the Holy Father, must be a land of malediction.
He smoked through two great cigars, and walked about the town unhappily, and when it was noon went upstairs to his sister. He did not dare to go a moment before the time.
"Dear Freddie, is it you?" said the Lady Hilda, listlessly; she looked very lovely and very languid, in a white cashmere morning gown, with a quantity of lace about it, and her hair all thrown back loosely, and tied like the Venere alla Spina's.
"I have to go away by the night train. Poor little Cheviot's ill," he said disconsolately, as he took her hand; he never ventured on kissing her; years before she had taught him that such endearments were very ridiculous and disagreeable.
"Dear me, I am very sorry. Will you have coffee, or tea, or wine?" she asked absently, as she went to the table where the breakfast was.
"Chevy's very ill," said Lord Clairvaux, ​who thought she showed small sympathy. "You used to like Chevy."
"He was a pretty little child. I hate boys."
"You wouldn't if you had them of your own," said Lord Clairvaux, and grumbled inaudibly as he took some cutlets.
Lady Hilda coloured a little.
"I have really not imagination enough to follow you:—will you have coffee? I hope it's nothing serious with Cheviot?"
"Fever, his mother thinks; any way I must go. I saw your friend the Duca della Rocca this morning: he was out early."
He thought this was approaching the subject in a masterly manner.
"Italians always rise early," said the Lady Hilda, giving him his cup.
"And he was at the Veglione last night—"
"All Italians go to the Veglione."
"You have seen a great deal of him, haven't you?" asked Lord Clairvaux, looking at her across the table, and thinking how pretty all that white was which she had on, and what a difficult person she was to begin anything with; he had ​never felt so nervous since the time when he had once been called on to move the Address when Parliament opened.
"One sees a great deal of everybody in a small society like this."
"Because you know people talk about you and him,—so they say at least."
"They are very good, whoever they are: who are they?"
"Who?— Oh, I don't know; I heard so."
"How very nice of you to discuss me with other people!"
Lord Clairvaux cast a glance at her and was very much frightened at the offence he saw in her contemptuous face: how pale she was looking too, now he thought of it, and she had shadows underneath her eyes quite new to her.
"What sort of a fellow is he?" he muttered. He seemed a duffer to me about his fields—such ploughs, by heavens!—and such waste in the stackyards I never saw. But it isn't farming here at all; it's letting things go wild just anyhow—"
"It is not being wiser than Nature, and ​sacrificing all loveliness to greed— if you mean that," said Lady Hilda, with coldest disdain. "The life here has still the old Theocritan idyllic beauty, thank heaven."
"Theocritus? Oh, I know; I never could construe him; but I do know a straight furrow and decently kept land when I see it. But I say, you know, I don't want to be officious or anything; but do you think it's wise to see so very much of him? You know he's an Italian, and I dare say hasn't a bit of principle, nor a penny in his pocket."
The hazel eyes of the Lady Hilda flashed golden beams of wrath.
"How very grateful of you!—when he has entertained you to the best of his ability, and went out of his way to find sport for you, very little to his own pleasure, moreover, for I can assure you his soul does not lie in his gun-barrel!"
"I don't want to say anything against him," murmured Lord Clairvaux, who was the most grateful and most just of mortals. "He was very kind and courteous, and all that—and I ​don't say he's a bad shot, though he's a bad farmer—and he is an awfully good-looking fellow, like an old picture, and all that. Only I must go to-night, Hilda, and I do want to speak to you."
"You are speaking all this time I believe," said Lady Hilda icily, looking across at him with the coldest challenge in her darkening eyes.
"I never could think why you didn't take Deutschland," he muttered, reverting to an old grievance.
"He didn't please me. Is that all you wanted to say?"
"But I thought you'd have cared to be a reigning sovereign?"
"Of a small State?" said the Lady Hilda, with an eloquent lift of her eyebrows.
"Well, there was De Ribeaupierre; he was everything anybody could want; Vienna, too; I used to think an Ambassadress's life would just suit you."
"Always calling on people and writing notes? No life on earth more tiresome."
​"I suppose you want to be an Empress?"
"Oh dear no," answered his sister. "I have known two Empresses intimately; and it is a career of great tedium: you can never do what you like."
"Then, I suppose, you are content as you are?"
"I suppose so, if anybody ever is. I don't think anyone is. I never met anybody who was. They say pigs are; but one sees so little of pigs that one can't make much psychological study of them."
Lord Clairvaux grumbled, sighed, and took his courage à deux mains.
"Well, never mind the other men; they are past and gone, poor wretches; what do you mean to do about this one?"
"This what?" said Lady Hilda, looking languidly at him through the flowers on the breakfast table. She knew quite well what he meant.
"What do you mean to do with him?" repeated Lord Clairvaux solemnly, pushing his plate away. "It's all very pretty, I daresay. ​Romeo and moonlight and poetry and all that sort of thing; Italians are the deuce and all for that, only I shouldn't have thought you'd have cared for it; and besides, you know it can't go on:—the man's a gentleman, that I grant; and, by heaven, that's a great deal now-a-days, such blackguards as we're getting,—three card scandals in the club already this very winter, and George Orme's was regular sharping, just what any cad might do, by Jove! But you know you can't go on with it; you can't possibly mean it seriously, now, do you?"
Lady Hilda laughed that little cold, contemptuous laughter which her brother always shivered under, and which Della Rocca had never heard.
"I don't seriously mean to cheat at cards! My deal? Frederic, you must say what you mean, if you mean anything at all, a little more clearly, please. Why will all Englishmen get their talk into such odd confusion? I suppose it comes of never learning grammar at Eton."
"Well, hang it then, I'll say it clearly," retorted Clairvaux, with some indignation. "Mila ​tells me you and this Italian that's always after you, have taken a liking to one another: is it true?—and what do you mean to do with him? There!"
He was horribly frightened when he had said it, but what he thought was his duty, that he did: and he conceived it to be his duty to speak.
All the blood leapt into the fair face of the Lady Hilda, her nostrils dilated in a fine anger, her lips grew pale.
"Mila is a little wretch!" she said, with strong passion; then was still; she was too generous to quote her own generosity, or urge her past gifts as present claims. "She is a little fool!" she added, with bitter disdain; "and how can you cheapen my name by listening to her chattering folly? Besides, what have you to do with me—or what has she? I am not used to dictation—nor to interference!"
"Oh, I know," said her brother, humbly. "And I beg your pardon, you are sure, and all that;—only, just tell me, how will it end?"
"How will what end?"
​"This fancy of yours."
Lady Hilda grew very pale.
"My dear Clairvaux," she said, with chilliest contempt, "you are not my keeper, nor my husband, nor anything else, except one of my trustees. I do not know that being a trustee gives you a title to be impertinent. You really talk as you might to your gamekeeper's daughter, if you thought you saw the girl 'going wrong.' What M. Della Rocca feels for me is merely sympathy in ideas and tastes. But if it were anything else, whose business would it be?"
Lord Clairvaux laughed.
"Yes!—you are a likely creature to inspire friendship! As if there were ever a woman worth looking at who could keep a man at that!—don't let us fence about it, Hilda. Perhaps I haven't any right to say anything. You're your own mistress and all that, and answerable to nobody. Only, can you deny that I am your brother?"
"I have always understood you were! I confess you make me regret the circumstance."
"Now that's ill-natured, very ill-natured," he ​murmured pathetically. "But you won't make me quarrel. There must be two to quarrel, and I won't be one. We have always been good friends, more than good friends. I thought I was the only person on earth you did like———"
"And, like everyone else, you consider that the liking you inspire confers a privilege to be impertinent," said his sister, with all that disdainful anger flashing from her languid eyes, which none of her family ever cared very much to meet.
She had risen from her chair, and was moving to and fro with a restless, controlled impatience. She remained very pale. Clairvaux kept his position on the hearth-rug, with a dogged good humour, and an uneasy confusion blended together which, at any other time, would have diverted her.
"Perhaps I may be impertinent," he said, humbly, "though, hang me, if I can see that that's a natural sort of word to be used between a brother and sister. I know you're a mighty great lady, and 'a law to yourself,' as some poet says; and never listen to anybody, and always go your own ways, and all that,—but still, if you ​never speak to me afterwards, I must say what I want to say. This man is in love with you, it's my belief you're in love with him—Mila says so, and she knows. Now, granted that it is so (if it isn't there's nothing to be angry about), what I say is, how do you mean it to end? Will you marry him?"
Her face changed, flushed, and then grew pale again.
"Of course not! You know it is impossible!"
"Does he know why it is impossible?"
"No—why should he? Really you do not know what you are talking about. You are interfering, in the most uncalled-for manner, where there is not the slightest necessity for any interference."
"Then you are letting him fall in love with you in the dark, and when you have had enough of the sport will throw him over?"
"You grow very coarse, Clairvaux. Oblige me by dropping the subject."
"I didn't know I was coarse. That is what you are going to do. You accept all his court ​now—and then you'll turn round on him some fine morning and say you've had enough of it. At least, I can't see what else you will do—since you cannot marry him, You'll hardly lower yourself to Mila's level and all the other women's—by heavens, if I thought you would, if I thought you had done, I'd soon see if this fellow were as fine a swordsman as they say!"
Lady Hilda turned her face full on him.
"So my brother is the first person that ever dared to insult me?" she said, with utmost coldness, as she rose from the breakfast table and swept his feet in passing with the lace that fringed the hem of her cashmere robes.
She gave him one parting look, and left the chamber.
He stood cowed by the golden fire of those superb imperious hazel eyes. He was nervous at what he had done, and unhappy and perplexed. He stood alone, pulling at his fair beard, in troubled repentance. He knew what her wrath would be. She was not a woman who quickly forgave.
"I've blundered; I always do blunder," he ​thought sadly to himself. "She must care awfully about him to be so angry."
He waited all alone many minutes; he was sincerely sorry; perhaps he had been coarse; he had not meant to be; only, the idea of her talked about, and with lovers!—just like all those other women whom their husbands or brothers ought to strangle—it was only fashion, they said, only the way of the world, all that immorality;—"Damn the world," he said to himself, ruffling his beard in sad bewilderment.
He scribbled a trite, rough, penitent note, and sent it to her by her maid. They brought him a closed envelope: when he opened it he found only his own note inside—sent back without any word.
Honest Clairvaux's eyes filled with tears.
"She'll never see me again before I go tonight," he thought to himself, tossing his poor little rejected morsel into the wood fire. "And I must go to-night, because of poor little Chevy. How horrid it is!—I couldn't be angry like that with her!"
He stood some moments more, knitting his ​fair, frank forehead, and wishing that he were less stupid in managing things; he had never in his life before presumed to condemn and counsel his sister—and this was the result!
Suddenly an idea struck him, and he rose.
"I will tell him," he thought. "I will tell him himself. And then I shall see what sort of stuff he is made of;—I can fight him afterwards if he don't satisfy me;—I'll tell him as if I suspected nothing—I can make an excuse, but when he hears it he'll show what he's made of;—oh, Lord, if it were only an Englishman she'd taken a liking to!—and to think that she's treated half the best men in Europe as if they were only so many stones under her feet!"
With a groan, Lord Clairvaux took up his hat, and went forth towards the Palazzo Della Rocca.
At six o'clock that evening he had to take his departure without seeing his sister again. He went away with a heavy heart.
"How extraordinary she is!" he thought. "Never even to ask me if I told the man anything or not. And never to bid one good-bye! ​Well, I've done for the best—I can't help it. She'll be sorry if poor little Chevy should die."
But the boy did not die; so that his father never learned whether that event would have touched the heart of Lady Hilda or not.
All the following day she shut herself up in her rooms. She said she was ill; and, in truth, she felt so. Della Rocca called three times in the day, but she did not see him; he sent up a great bouquet of the pale yellow tea rose of which she was so fond; he had fastened the flowers together with an antique silver zone, on which was the Greek Love in relief; the Love of the early Hellenic poets, without wings and with a mighty sword, the Love of Anacreon, which forges the soul as a smith his iron, and steeps it in icy waters after many blows.
She understood the message of the Love, but she sent no message back.
It was a lovely day; underneath the windows the carriages were rolling; there was the smile of spring on the air as the fleecy clouds went sailing past; she could see the golden reaches of the river and the hyacinth-hued hills ​where Palestrina lay; her heart was heavy; her pulse was quick; her conscience was ill at ease; her thoughts were restless and perturbed. Solitude and reflection were so new to her; they appalled her. When she had been unwell before, which had been but seldom, she had always beguiled herself by looking over the jewels in their cases, sorting rare old Marcantonios and Morghens, skimming French feuilletons, or planning new confections for her vast stores of old laces. But now none of these distractions were possible to her; she sat doing nothing, weary, feverish, and full of a passionate pain.
The fact which her brother had told to Della Rocca was that, if she married again, all her riches would pass away from her.
At the time of her marriage her father had been deeply involved in debt; gambling, racing, and debts of every other kind had been about him like spiders' webs; the great capitalist, Vorarlberg, had freed him on condition of receiving the hand of his young daughter in exchange. She was allowed to know nothing of these matters; but under such circumstances it ​was impossible for the family to be exacting as regarded sentiments: she was abandoned entirely to the old man's power. Fortunately for herself, he was taken ill on the very day of the nuptials, and, after a lingering period of suffering, died, leaving her mistress of half of one of the finest fortunes in Europe. By birth he was a Wallachian Jew, brought up in London and Paris, but he had been naturalised in England, when a youth, for commercial objects, and the disposition of his property lay under his own control. A year or two after his death a later will was found by his lawyers, still leaving her the same income, but decreeing that in the event of her second marriage everything should pass away from her to the public charities, save alone her jewels, her horses, all things she might have purchased, the house in Paris, which had been a gift, and some eight hundred a year already secured to her. The new will was proved, and she was informed that she could enjoy her fortune only by this tenure. She was indifferent. She was quite sure that she would never wish to many any one. She loved her wealth and spent ​it magnificently; and when men proposed whose own position would have made the loss of her own money of no moment, she still repulsed them, thinking always "le mieux est l'ennemi du bien."
The fact of this later will was scarcely known beyond the precincts of the law and the circle of their own family; but since she had met Della Rocca, the remembrance of it had kept her awake many a night, and broken roughly many a day-dream.
To surrender her fortune to become his wife never once occurred to her as possible. Ten years' enjoyment of her every whim had made it seem so inalienably hers. She had entered so early into her great possessions, that they had grown to be a very part of her. The old man who had been her husband but in name was but a mere ghostly shadow to her. The freedom and the self-indulgence she had so long enjoyed had become necessary to her as the air she breathed. She could no more face the loss of her fortune than she could have done that of her beauty. It was not the mere vulgar vaunt ​or ostentation of wealth that had attraction for her; it was all the supremacy, the ease, the patronage, the habits, that great wealth alone makes possible; it was the reign which she had held throughout Europe; it was the charm of perfectly irresponsible power. To give up these and hear the cackle of all the fools she had eclipsed mocking at her weakness!—it would be beyond all endurance.
What was she to do?
The lax moralities of the women of her time were impossible to her proud and loftier character; and besides, she felt that a woman who preferred the world to him, would not find in Della Rocca a forgiving or a submissive lover. When he knew, what would he say?
She turned sick at the thought. After all, she had played with him and deceived him; he would have just cause of passionate reproach against her. His love had no wings, but it had a sword.
"Will Miladi be able to dine?" her maid asked her, vaguely alarmed at the strange stillness and the great paleness of her face.
"Was I to dine anywhere?" she said wearily
​She was to dine at the Archduchess Anna's. The Archduchess Anna was passing through Floralia after three months at Palermo for health, and was staying in strict incognita, and infinite glee, as the Countess Von Feffers at the Hotel del Rè; enjoying herself endlessly, as the gay-hearted lady that she was, even indulging once in the supreme delight of driving in a cab, and with no other recognition of her great rank than consisted in the attendance upon her of the handsomest of the king's chamberlains.
"Dress me, then," said Lady Hilda, with a sigh. She could not excuse herself to the Archduchess, whom she had known intimately for years, and who was to leave Floralia in a week.
"What gown does Madame select?" asked her maid.
"Give me any you like," she answered.
She did not care how she would look; she would not meet him; she knew that he had no acquaintance with the imperial lady.
The maids, left to themselves, gave her the last new one from Worth; only six days arrived; a dress entirely white, with knots of purple ​velvet, exactly copied from a picture of Boucher, and with all the grace of dead Versailles in its folds. She put a rococo necklace on, with a portrait of Maria Theresa in it, and went listlessly to the dinner; she was not thinking about her appearance that night, or she would have said that she was too pale to wear all that white.
"Goodness me, Hilda, how ill you do look," said Madame Mila, meeting her on the stairs, and who was going also.
"No, thanks, I won't drive with you; two women can't go in a carriage without one being chiffonnée. That's an exquisite toilette; that white brocade is delicious—stamped with the lilies of France,—very pretty; only you're too pale for it to-night, and it's a pity to wear it only for the Archduchess. She never knows what anybody's got on their backs. Is anything the matter, dear?"
"Nothing in the world."
"Then you must have got a headache? You certainly do look very ill. I do so hope we shall get away in time for the Veglione. It's the very ​last night, you know. I had such fun last time. I intrigué'd heaps of people, and Doggendorff I drove wild; I told him everything about his wife and Lelio Castelpucci, and all against himself that she'd ever told me. It was such fun—he'd not an idea who I was, for when we were at supper, he came running in breathless to tell us of a horrible little mask with a voice like a macaw's;—you know I'd put a pebble under my tongue."
"Very dangerous pastime, and a very vulgar one," said the Lady Hilda, descending the staircase. "How can you go down into that horrible screeching mob, Mila? It is so very low."
"My dear, I go anywhere to amuse myself, and Maurice was always near me, you know, so if I had been insulted——— There's eight o'clock striking."
The Hotel del Rè was but ten minutes' drive along the famous river-street, which has such an Arabian Nights-like beauty when the lamps are lighted, and gleam in long lines adown each shore, and mirror themselves in the water, whilst dome, and bell-tower, and palace-roof raise ​themselves darkly against the steel-blue sky of the night.
The Archduchess had been spending a long day in the galleries, studying art under the guidance of the handsome chamberlain; she was hungry, happy, and full of the heartiest spirits; she was a very merry and good-natured person, about five-and-forty years old, fat and fair, very badly dressed, and very agreeable, with a frank laugh, and a strong love of humour; she had had more escapades than any princess in Europe, and smoked more cigars than a French newspaper writer, and had married more daughters to German cousins than anybody else in the Almanac de Gotha.
Had she been any lesser being, Society would have turned its back on her; but, being who she was, her nod was elevation, and her cigar-ash honour,—and, to do her justice, she was one of the most amiable creatures in all creation.
"Ma chère, you are lovelier than ever!—and how do you like this place?—and is the dear little pug alive? I lost my sweet Zaliote of asthma in Palermo," said the Archduchess, ​welcoming the Lady Hilda, as she did everything with ardour.
Lady Hilda, answering, felt her colourless cheeks grow warm; in the circle standing round she recognised Della Rocca. The Archduchess had taken a fancy to the look of him in the street, and had bade the chamberlain present him, and then had told him to come to dinner: she liked to surround herself with handsome men. From Madame Mila he had learned in the morning that her cousin would dine there at night.
Madame Mila concluded in her own mind that Freddie had had a row with his sister upon the matter, but that Della Rocca had had nothing said to him about it by either of them. Madame Mila concluded also that Hilda had grown sensible, and was doing like other women, though why she looked so ill about it, Madame Mila could not imagine. Madame Mila did not comprehend scruples.
It was very painful, for instance, to be allied to any one of the Greek Church, and a great grief to the Holy Father; but still it was very nice to be married to a Schismatic, because it ​enabled you to go to balls a fortnight longer: if it was still your husband's carnival, you know, nobody could say anything.
Madame Mila thought you should always do your best to please everybody; but then you should take care that you pleased yourself first most of all. The world was easy enough to live in if you did not worry: there were always unpaid bills to be sure, and they were odious. But then Hilda never had any unpaid bills; so she never could have anything to annoy her.
Apropos of bills, she hoped Della Rocca would not use his influence with her cousin so as to prevent her paying other people's bills. Of course he wouldn't do this just at present; but when men had been lovers a little while, she reflected, they always turned the poetry into prose, and grew very nearly as bad as husbands.
Madame Mila watched them narrowly all through dinner.
"If I thought he'd make her stingy, I'd make her jealous of Giulia Malatesta to-morrow," she thought to herself. Madame Mila on occasion ​had helped or hindered circumstance amongst her friends and enemies with many ingenious little devices and lucky little anonymous notes, and other innocent shifts and stratagems. It was no use being in the world at all unless you interfered with the way it went; to be a mere puppet in the hands of Fate, with the strings of accident dangling to and fro, seemed to her clever little brains quite unworthy the intelligence of woman.
She never meant to do any harm, oh, never; only she liked things to go as she wished them. Who does not? If a few men and women had been made wretched for life, and people who loved one another devotedly had been parted for ever, and suspicion and hatred had crept into the place of trust and tenderness in certain households, Madame Mila could not help that, any more than one can help other people being splashed with mud when one drives down a lane in bad weather. And nobody ever thought Madame Mila could do any harm; pretty, good-natured, loquacious, little Madame Mila, running about with her little rosebuds at fancy fairs, and ​saying so sweetly, "Pour nos pauvres—pour nos chers pauvres!"
"The best little woman in the world," as everybody said, Madame Mila would kiss her female enemies on both cheeks wherever she met them; and when she had sent an anonymous letter (for fun), always sent an invitation to dinner just after it, to the same direction.
"I wish I knew how it is really between them," she thought at the Archduchess's dinner-table, divided between her natural desire to see her cousin let fall that "white flower of a blameless life," which stinks as garlic in the nostrils of those who have it not, and her equally natural apprehension that Paolo della Rocca as a lover would not let his mistress pay other persons' debts, and would also be sure to see all her letters.
"She'll tell him everything about everybody," thought Madame Mila, uncomfortably; for Della Rocca had a look in his eyes of assured happiness, which, to the astute experience of Madame Mila, suggested volumes.
Meantime she was also harassed by an ​apprehension that she would not be able to withdraw in time for the Veglione, where Maurice, a baignoir, and a supper-table awaited her. If the Archduchess should sit down to play of any sort hope was over, escape would be impossible till daydawn; and Madame Mila hated playing with the Archduchess; with such personages she was afraid to cheat, and was obliged to pay.
With all the ingenuity, therefore, of which she was mistress, she introduced the idea of the Veglione into the mind of her hostess, and so contrived to fascinate her with the idea, that the Archduchess, who had gone in her time to five hundred public masked balls, was as hotly animated into a desire to go to this one as though she had been just let out of a convent at eighteen years old.
Madame Mila delightedly placed her baignoir at the disposition of her imperial highness, and her imperial highness invited all her guests to accompany her; such invitations are not optional; and Lady Hilda, who hated noise as her horses hated masks, was borne off by the mirthful, chattering, and gay-hearted lady, who had no ​objection to noise, and loved fun and riot like a street boy.
Lady Hilda thought a Veglione, and a liking for it, both beneath contempt; yet she was not unwilling to avoid all chance of being alone with Della Rocca even for a moment. She knew what he would say:—his eyes had said it all the evening a thousand times.
The Archduchess Anna and Madame Mila were both in the very highest spirits; they had taken a good deal of champagne, as ladies will, and had smoked a good deal and got thirsty, and had more champagne with some seltzer water, and the result was the highest of high spirits. Nothing could be more appropriate to a Veglione; as no reasonable being could stay by choice in one for an hour, it is strongly advisable that reason should be a little dethroned by a very dry wine before entering the dingy paradise. Of course nobody ever sees great ladies 'the worse for wine'; they are only the better, as a Stilton cheese is.
Happy and hilarious, shrouded and masked beyond all possibility of identification, and ready ​for any adventure, the Archduchess Anna was no sooner in the box than she was out of it, and declared her intention of going down into the crowd. Madame Mila, only too glad, went with her, and some half-dozen men formed their escort. Lady Hilda excused herself on the plea of a headache, a plea not untrue, and alone with the Duc de St. Louis awaited the return of her hostess. She had only put on her mask for entry, and had now laid it beside her; she threw aside her domino, for the heat of the box was stifling, and the whiteness of her dress shone as lilies do at moonlight. She leaned her cheek on her hand, and looked down on to the romping, screaming, many-coloured throngs.
"You are not well to-night, Madame?" said the Duc, with the affectionate solicitude that he felt for all pretty women.
He was puzzled as to how her relations could stand with Della Rocca: the previous night he had thought everything settled, but now he did not feel quite so sure.
"The Archduchess is so noisy; it always gives me a headache to dine with her," said ​Lady Hilda. "She is very good-natured; but her talking is ———!"
"She is an admirable heavy dragoon—manqué, said the Duc. "Most good-natured, as you say, but trying to the tympanum and the taste. So Clairvaux left last night?"
"Yes: Cheviot was taken ill."
"I should have thought it was a racer taken ill by the consternation he seemed to be in, I saw him for a moment only."
She was silent, watching the whirling of the pierrots, harlequins, scaramouches and dominoes, who were shrieking and yelling in the throng below.
"I think he liked his shooting with Paolo?" said the Duc, at a hazard.
"He likes shooting anywhere."
"Certainly there is something wrong," thought the Duc, stooping a little to look at her brocaded white lilies. "What an exquisite toilette!—is one permitted to say so?"
"Oh dear, no!" said the Lady Hilda petutantly. "The incessant talk about dress is so tiresome and so vulgar; the women who want ​their costumes praised are women who have only just began to dress tolerably, and are still not quite sure of the effects!"
"You are right, as always," said the Duc, with a little bow and a little smile. "But now and then perfection surprises us into involuntary indiscretion. You must not be too severe."
"Somebody should be severe," she said, contemptuously. "Society is a Battle of the Frogs, for rivality in dress and debt."
The Duc laughed.
"What do you know about it, Madame? You who are as above rivals as above debts? By the way, you told me you wanted some old Pesaro vases. I found some yesterday at Biangini's shop that might please you; they come out of an old pharmacy in Verona; perhaps the very pharmacy of Romeo's apothecary; and there are some fine old pots too ———"
"I am tired of buying things."
"The weariness of empire!—nothing new. You must take to keeping hens and chickens, as the Emperor John Vatices did. How does ​Camille Odissot succeed with your ball-room frescoes?"
"I have no idea. Very ill, I dare say."
"Yes, it is a curious thing that we do not succeed in fresco. The grace is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette knife as a mason the trowel. The art too, like the literature of our time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks knew neither domesticity nor melodrama, and the early Italian painters were imbued with a faith which, if not so virile as the worship of the Phidian Zeus, yet absorbed them and elevated them in a degree impossible in the tawdry Sadduceeism of our own day. By the way, when the weather is milder you must go to Orvieto; you have never been there, I think; it is the Prosodion of Signorelli. What a fine Pagan he was at heart! He admired masculine ​beauty like a Greek; he must have been a singularly happy man—few more happy ———"
The Duc paused as the handle of the door turned; he was only talking because he saw that she was too weary or too languid to talk herself; the door opened, and Della Rocca entered the box again, having escaped from the Archduchess.
"We were speaking of Orvieto; you know more of it than I do. I was telling Miladi that she must go there about Easter time," said the Duc, hunting for his crush hat beneath the chair. "Take my seat, mon cher, for a moment; I see Salvareo in the crowd, and I must speak to him about her imperialissima's supper. I shall be back in an instant."
He departed, with no intention of returning, and was assailed in the corridor by a party of masks, who bore him off gaily between them down the staircase into the laughing, screaming, and capering multitude.
Della Rocca did not take his chair, but sank into the seat behind her, while his hand closed on hers.
​"Will you not even look at me?" he murmured.
She drew her hand away, and put her mask on, slipping its elastic round her delicate ears.
"How the crowd yells!" she said, impatiently. "Will the Archduchess stay there long, do you think?"
With gentlest audacity and softest skill he had slipped off the mask and had laid it behind him before she had realised what he was doing; his hand had touched her as lightly as though a feather brushed a rose.
She rose in amazed anger, and turned on him coldly.
"M. Della Rocca! how dare you presume so far? Give me my mask at once—"
"No," he said, softly; and he took hold of her hands and drew her towards the back of the box where no eyes could reach them, and knelt down before her as she sat there in the dusky shadow of the dark red draperies.
"Oh, my love—my love!" he murmured; that was all; but his arms stole about her, and ​his head drooped till his forehead rested on her knees.
For the moment she did not repulse him; she did not stir nor speak; she yielded herself to the embrace, mute and very pale, and moved to a strange tumult of emotion, whether of anger or of gladness she barely knew.
He lifted his head, and his eyes looked into hers till her own could look no longer.
"You love me?" he whispered to her, whilst his arms still held her imprisoned.
She was silent; under the purple knot of velvet at her breast, he saw her heart heave, her breath come and go; a hot colour flushed over all her face, then faded, and left her again pale as her white brocade.
"It were of no use if—if I did," she muttered. "You forget yourself;—leave me."
But he knelt there, looking at her till the look seemed to burn her like flame; yet she did not rise:—she, the very hem of whose garment no man before him had ever dared to touch.
"You love me!" he murmured, and said the same thing again and again and again, in all ​the various eloquence of passion. She trembled a little under his close caress; the dusky red of the box whirled around her; the shouting of the multitude below beat like the sound of a distant sea on her ears.
As he kneeled at her feet she touched his forehead one moment with her hand in a gesture of involuntary tenderness.
"It is of no use," she said, faintly again. "You do not understand—you do not know."
"Yes: I do know," he answered her.
"You know!" ———
"Yes: your brother told me."
"And yet?" ———
"Since we love one another, is not that enough?"
She breathed like a person suffocated; she loosened herself from his arms, and drew away from him, and rose.
"It makes no change in you, then!" she said, wonderingly, and looked at him through a blinding mist, and felt sick and weary and bewildered, as she had never thought it possible to feel.
"Change in me? What change? save that ​I am freer to seek you—that is all. Oh, my empress, my angel!—is not love enough? Has your life without love contented you so well that you fear to face love alone?"
He still knelt at her feet and kissed her hands and her dress, as he spoke; he looked upward at the pale beauty of her face.
She shivered a little as with cold. "That is folly," she muttered. "You must know it is of no use. I could not live—poor."
The word stung him; he rose to his feet; he was silent. After all, what had he to offer her? he loved her—that was all.
She loosened the loose chain about her throat, and looked away beyond him at the lights of the theatre. With an effort she recovered her old indifferent cold manner.
"You have forgotten yourself: it is all folly: you must know that: you surprised me into—weakness—for a moment. But it is over now. Give me my mask, and take me to the carriage."
"No!"——— He leaned against the door, and looked down on her: all the rapture of expectancy and of triumph had faded from his ​face; the pallor and suffering of a great passion were on it; he had known that she loved the things of the world; but he had believed that she loved him more.
He was undeceived. He looked at this beautiful woman with the gold chain loosed about her throat, and the white brocaded lilies gleaming in the gloom, and only by a supreme effort did he subdue the bitterness and brutality which lie underneath all strong passions.
"One moment!" he said, as she moved to reach the door. "Can you say you have no love for me?"
Her colour varied.
"What is the use? Give me my mask."
"Can you say you do not love me?"
She hesitated; she wished to lie and could not.
"I did not say that," she murmured. "Perhaps if things were different—But, as it is—it is no use."
The half-confession sufficed, it loosened his lips to passionate appeal; with all the eloquence natural to him and to his language, he poured ​out on her all the supplication, all the entreaty, all the persuasion, that he was master of; he lavished every amorous endearment that his language held; he painted the joys of great and mutual passion with a fervour and a force that shook her like a whirlwind; he upbraided her with her caprices, with her coldness, with her selfishness, till the words cut her like sharp stripes: he besought her by the love with which he loved her till the voluptuous sweetness of it stole over all her senses, and held her silent and enthralled.
He knelt at her feet, and held her hands in his.
"Does your life content you?" he said at the last. "Can greatness of any sort content a woman without love? Can any eminence, or power, or possession make her happiness without love? Say that I am poor; that coming to me you would come to what in your sight were poverty; is wealth so great a thing measured against the measureless strength of passion? Are not the real joys of our lives things unpurchaseable? Oh, my love, my love! If you had no preference for me I were the vainest fool to urge you; but, ​as it is—does the world that tires you, the society that wearies you, the men and women who fatigue you—the adulation that nauseates you—the expenditure that after all is but a vulgarity in your sight—the acquisition that has lost its charm for you with long habit, like the toys of a child; are all those things so supreme with you that you can seud me from you for their sake? Is not one hour of mutual love worth all the world can give?"
His arms held her close, he drew her down to him nearer and nearer till his head rested on her breast, and he felt the tumultuous throbbing of her heart. For one moment of scarce conscious weakness she did not resist or repulse him, but surrendered herself to the spell of his power. He moved her as no mortal creature had ever had strength to do; a whole world unknown opened to her with his touch and his gaze; she loved him. For one moment she forgot all else.
But all the while, even in the temporary oblivion to which she had yielded, she never dreamed of granting what he prayed.
​The serenity and pride in her were shaken to their roots; she was humbled in her own sight; she was ashamed of the momentary delirium to which she had abandoned herself; she strove in vain to regain composure and indifference: come what would, he was near to her as no other man had ever been.
She drew her domino about her with a shudder, though the blood coursed like fever in her veins.
"You must hate me—or forget me," she murmured, as she tried to take her mask from his hand. " You know it is no use. I could not live—poor. Perhaps you are right; all those things are habits, follies, egotisms—oh, perhaps. But such as they are— such as I am—I could never live without them."
He stood erect, and his face grew cold.
"That is your last word, Madame?"
"Yes. What else should I say? No other—"her voice faltered a moment and grew very weak. "No other man will ever be anything to me, if that content you. But more—is impossible."
He bowed low in silence, and gave her up her mask.
​She felt afraid to look up at his face.
The door opened on them noisily; the Archduchess and Madame Mila were returning to refresh themselves with their supper ere descending again to fresh diversions. Behind them came the Duc de St. Louis and all the men of their party, and their servants with the tressels for the setting of the table in their box.
They were fuller than ever of laughter, mirth, high spirits, and riotous good humour; their white teeth shone under the lace of their loups, and their eyes sparkled through the slits. They had frightened some people, and teased more, and had been mistaken for two low actresses and jested with accordingly, and were as much flattered as the actresses would have been had they been taken for princesses.
The Lady Hilda prayed of the Archduchess's goodness to be excused from awaiting the supper; she had been ill all day, and her headache was very severe.
The Archduchess was in too high spirits to listen very much, or to care who went or who stayed.
​"Take me to the carriage, Duc," said Lady Hilda, patting her hand on the arm of M. de St. Louis.
Della Rocca held the door open for her. He bowed very low, once more, as she passed him.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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