# In a Winter City/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII.
In three weeks' time Lady Hilda returned from Rome.
She had been affectionately received by the Holy Father; she had been the idol of the nobles of the Black; she had bought a quantity of pictures, and marbles, and bronzes, and Castellani jewellery; she had gone to early mass every day, and ridden hard every day; she had thought Totila would have been more bearable than Signor Rosa, and she had shuddered at the ruined flora of the Colosseum and the scrapings and bedaubings of the Palace of the Cæsars.
She returned contemptuous, disgusted, tired of the age she lived in, and regretful that she ​had not spared herself the sight of so much desecration. She conceived that Genseric or the Constable de Bourbon must have been much less painful than a syndicate and an army of bricklayers. She refused to go out anywhere on the score of its being Lent, and she meditated going to London for the season to that very big house in Eaton Square, which she honoured for about three months in as many years. She hated London, and its society was a mob, and its atmosphere was thickened soda-water, and no other place had such horrible endless dinner parties. Still she was going;—when?—oh, tomorrow or next week.
But to-morrow became yesterday, and next week became last week, and her black and white liveries were still airing themselves on the steps of the Murat, and her black horses still were trotting to and fro the stones of Floralia, bearing little Madame Mila hither and thither.
Their own mistress stirred out but little; it was damp weather, and she coughed, and she shut herself up with millions of hyacinths and ​narcissi, and painted a St. Ursula on wood for her chapel in Paris.
She painted well, but the St. Ursula progressed but slowly.
When she was alone she would let her palette fall to her side and sit thinking; and the bells would ring across the waters till she hated them.
What was the use of painting a St. Ursula? St. Ursula did not want to be painted; and all art was nothing but repetition: nobody had found out anything in colour really, since Giotto, though to be sure he could not paint transparencies or reflections. And she would leave her St. Ursula impatiently, and read Cavalcaselle and Zugler and Winckelmann and Rumohr and Passavant, and when she did go out would go to some little remote, unvisited chapel and sit for hours before some dim disputed fresco.
She would be in London next week, in its blaze of gas, jewels, luxury, and political discussion; she said that she liked these calm, dusky, silent places, alone with S. Louis and S. Giles and S. Jerome.
​Madame Mila puzzled over her conduct in vain. She did not dare to ask anything, be- cause there were those sixty thousand francs, and her cousin had helped her about them, and you cannot say very intrusive or impertinent things to a person who is lending you money; but it was very odd, thought Madame Mila incessantly, because she evidently was unhappy about the man, and wanted him, and yet must have sent him away. Of course she couldn't have married him; but still there were ways of managing everything; and in Hilda's position she really could do as she liked, and nobody ever would even have said a word.
Of course she would not have married him; that Madame Mila knew; but Society would have made no objection to his being about her always like her courier and her pug and the rest of her following; and if Society doesn't object to a thing, why on earth should you not do it?
II ne faut pas être plus royaliste que le roi: there cannot be the slightest necessity to be more scrupulous than the people that are round you; indeed, to attempt to be more so is to ​be disagreeable and tacitly impertinent to others.
There is a certain latitude, which taken, makes you look much more amiable. Madame Mila was kissed on both cheeks really with sincerity by many ladies in many cities, merely because her nice management of her Maurice made their Maurices easier for them, and their pleasant consciousness of her frailty was the one touch which made them all akin. Polyandry made easy is a great charm in Society—there is no horrid scandal for any one, and no fuss at all: Monsieur is content and Madame enjoys herself, everybody goes everywhere, and everything is as it should be.
"If that old man had lived, Hilda would have been glad to be like everyone else," Madame Mila thought, with much impatience. "Of course, because she is quite free, she don't care a bit to use her freedom."
Madame Mila herself felt that although her passion for Maurice was the fifty-sixth passion of her soul, and the most ardent of all her existence, that even Maurice himself would have lost some ​of his attraction if he had lost the pleasant savour of incorrectness that attached to him, and if she had not had to take all those precautions about his going to another hotel, &c, &c, which enabled her to hold her place in courts and embassies, and made her friends all able to say with clear consciences, "Nothing in it, oh dear! nothing in it whatever!" Not that she cared about anyone believing that there was nothing in it; she did not even wish anybody to believe it; she only wanted it said—that was all; because, whilst it can be said, a woman "goes everywhere" still, and though Heloise or Francesca may be willing to "lose the world for love," the Femme Galante has no notion of doing anything of the sort.
"She must have refused him?" the Duc de St. Louis said to her more than once, harassed by chagrin at the failure of his project, and by a curiosity which his good breeding forbade him to seek to satisfy at the fountain head.
"Oh, I daresay she did," said Madame Mila. "Of course she did. But if she care for him, ​why should she send him away?—il y a des moyens pour tout. They are brouillés somehow, that is certain. Oh, yes—certain! He was here when Hilda came back, and we passed him one day in the street, and he took off his hat and bowed, and looked very cold and pale and went onwards; and he has never called once. Now you know he is gone to the Marshes, and after that they say he is going into Sicily to see after that brigand Pibro. It is not like an Italian to be so soon repulsed."
"It is very like an Italian to be too proud to ask twice," said the Duc, and added with a little smile, "He never said anything to me. Only once lately he said that he was sure that Miladi would be a very different creature if she had home interests and children!"
"Good gracious!" said Madame Mila, "she was quite right to have nothing to do with him if he have that kind of ideas. How little he knows her too! Hilda is quite unnatural about children; quite horrid; she never speaks to them; and when she saw my dear little Lili dressed as Madame l'Archiduc for the babies' ​fancy ball at the Elysée, what do you think she said?—she told me that I polluted the child's brain before it could distinguish right from wrong, and that a mixture of Judic and Fashion at five years old was disgusting; and Lili looked lovely!—she was so prettily rouged, and Maurice had given her a necklace of pink pearls. But Hilda has no human feeling at all."
"Della Rocca did not think so," said the Duc.
"Della Rocca was in love," said Madame Mila, scornfully, "with the beaux yeaux de sa cassette too;—as well. They may only have quarrelled, you know. Hilda is very disagreeable and difficult. By the way, Deutschland went after her to Rome, and proposed to her again."
"Indeed! and she refused him again?"
"Oh, yes. She refuses them all. I did fancy she was touched by Della Rocca, but you see it came to nothing; she is as cold as a crystal. She likes to know that heaps of men are wretched about her, and she likes to study those dingy old paintings, and that is all she does ​like, or ever will like. She will be very unhappy as she grows older, and I dare say she will be quite capable of leaving all her money away from her family to build a cathedral, or found a School of Art."
And Madame Mila, impatient, nodded to the Duc, and dashed away in the victoria behind the white and black liveries. She was managing to enjoy her Lent after all: her mind being at rest about those sixty thousand francs, there was no occasion to be so very rigid; low bodices she did not wear, because she was a woman of her word; but then she had half a hundred divine confections, cut square, or adorned with ruffs, or open en cœur with loveliest lace and big bouquets of roses, to make that form of renunciation simpler; there was plenty going on, and little "sauteries," which nobody could call balls, and pleasant gatherings, quite harmless, because only summoned for "music," and altogether, what with the oasis of mi-Carême, and the prolongation of the Carnival in Russian houses, life was very endurable; and there were Neapolitan oysters to fast upon comfortably. ​Heaven tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and it would be hard if Society did not soften penitence to the Femme Galante.
The Lady Hilda did keep her Lent, and kept it strictly, and was never seen at the "sauteries," and rarely at the musical parties. But then everyone knew that she was dévote (when she was not slightly Voltairean), and it could not be expected that a woman going to reign in the vast world of London would put herself out to be amiable in Floralia. Yet, had they only known it, she loved Floralia in her own heart as she had never loved any other place upon earth. The beautiful small city set along its shining waters, with all the grace of its classic descent, its repose of contemplative art, its sanctity of imperishable greatness, had a hold upon her that no other spot under the sun could ever gain. If she thought others unworthy of it, she thought herself no less unworthy. It seemed to her that to be worthy to dwell in it, one needed to be wise and pure and half divine, even as St. Ursula herself.
And all the pride in her was shaken to the ​roots: she was full of a restless, dissatisfied humility; there were times when she hated herself, and was weary of herself to utter impatience. She shut herself up with her art studies and the old frescoes, because they pained her less than any other thing. She was passionately unhappy: though to other people she only seemed a trifle more cynical and more contemptuous than before, no more.
The easy morality with which her cousin would have solved all difficulty, was not possible to her. She would not have cheated the old dead man from whom her riches came, by evading him in the spirit of his will whilst adhering to the letter. Unless she gave up her riches, her lover could be nothing to her: and the thought of giving them up never even occurred to her as possible. She did not know it, because she was so very tired of so many things; but the great world she had always lived in was very necessary to her, and had absolute dominion over her; it became tiresome, as the trammels of empire do to a monarch; but to lay down her sceptre would have been an abdication, and an ​abnegation, impossible to her. And she despised herself because they were impossible; despised herself because to his generosity she had only responded with what at best was but a vulgar egotism; despised herself because she had been so weak that she had permitted his familiarities and his caresses unrebuked; despised herself for everything with that self scorn of a proud woman, which is far more intense and bitter than any scorn that she has ever dealt out upon others.
She had lived all her life on a height of unconscious, but no less absorbing, self-admiration. She had looked down on all the aims and objects and attainments and possessions of all other persons with a bland and superb vanity; she had been accustomed to regard herself as perfect, as others all united to tell her that she was; and her immunity from mean frailties and puerile emotions had given her a belief that she was lifted high above the passions and the follies of humankind; now, all of a sudden, she had dropped to the lowest depths of weakness and of selfishness—passion ​had touched her, yet had left her without its courage.
In those long, lonely, studious days in Lent, studying her religious art with wandering thoughts, she grew to hate herself; yet, to resign her empire for another's sake never even distantly appeared to her as possible.
One day, in a little private chapel, where there were some fine dim works in tempera, only to be seen by earliest morning light, she was startled by seeing him near her; he was coming from the sacristy on business of the church; he looked at her quickly, and would have passed on with a silent salutation, but she approached him on an impulse which a moment later she regretted.
"Need you avoid me?" she said, hurriedly. "Surely—I go from here so soon—we might still be friends? People would talk less———"
He looked down on her with a cold severity which chilled her, like the passing of an icy wind.
"Madame," he answered her, with a fleeting smile, "your northern lovers, perhaps, may have been content to accept such a position. I am, I confess, thankless. I thought you too proud to ​heed what 'people said'; but if that trouble you—I go myself to Sicily to-morrow."
Then he bowed very low once more, and, with his salutation to the altar, went on his way through the dusky shadows of the little chapel out into the morning sunshine of the street. Her eyes grew blind with tears, and she sank down before a wooden bench upon her knees; yet could not pray there for the bitterness and tumult of her heart.
She found her master in him.
His passionless unpardoning gaze sank into her very soul, and seemed like a ruthless light, that showed her all the wretchedness of pride and self-love and vainest ostentations, which she had harboured there and set up as her gods.
She comprehended that she had wronged him, and that he would not forgive. After all—knowing what she knew, she had had no right to deal with him as she had done. She had allowed him to bask in the sun of a fool's paradise; and then had awakened him rudely, and had sent him adrift. She had been ungenerous: she saw it, and hated her own fault with the ​repentance of a generous temper. She had gone through the world with but little heed for the pain of others; but his pain smote her conscience. After all, he had a title to upbraid her passionately; that he refrained from doing so made her own self-reproach the keener. There had been so many moments when with justice he might have felt certain that she loved him: and how could he guess the rest? She knew that she had wronged him; and she was humbled in her own sight; she had lost her own self-respect, and her own motives seemed to her but poor, and almost base.
No amorous entreaty, no feverish pursuit of her, had ever moved her so intensely as that silent condemnation, as that contemptuous rejection, of her poor half-hearted overture of peace.
When she left the chapel she loved him as she had never done before; yet it never occurred to her to abandon her riches for his sake. The habits and the ways of the world were too close about her; its artificial needs and imperious demands were too entirely her second nature; its ​admiration was too necessary to her, and her custom of deference to its conventional laws too much an instinct; she had been too long accustomed to regard the impulses of the heart as insane follies, and poverty of life as pain and madness.
The same evening he did leave the town for Sicily, where he had lands which, though beautiful, were utterly unproductive, and constantly harried by the system of brigandage, which paralysed the district. "He will get shot most likely. He has declared that he will not return without having captured Pibro," said an Italian in her hearing, at a musical gathering, dedicated to the music of Pergolese. Pibro was a notorious Sicilian robber. The sweet chords sounded very harsh and jangled in her ears; she left early, and went home and took a heavy dose of chloral, which only gave her dark and dreary dreams.
"What miserable creatures we are!" she thought, wearily. "We cannot even sleep naturally—poor people can sleep;—they lie on hard benches, and dream with smiles on their faces."
She got up and looked out at the moonlight ​on the river, and walked to and fro her chamber; a lofty, slender, white figure in the pale gleam of the lamp-rays.
A passionate, feverish, disordered pain consumed her. It terrified her. Would it be thus weeks, months, years—all her life?
"Perhaps it is the chloral that unnerves one," she thought; "I will not take it any more."
"Only fancy, ma chère," said Madame Mila to her next morning, with the pretty cat-like cruelty of the Mila species, "only fancy—that poor dear Della Rocca is gone to his death in Sicily. So they say. There is a horrid brigand who has been hanging some of his farmers there to trees, and burning their cottages, Della Rocca's farmers, you know; and he is gone to see about it, and to capture the wretched creature,—as if he could when all the soldiers and all the police have failed! He will be quite certain to be shot; isn't it a pity? He is so handsome, and if he would marry that little American Spiffler girl with all her millions he might be very happy. That little Spiffler is really not unpresentable, and her people will give the largest dot ever heard of if they can ​get one of the very old titles; and they will make no difficulty about religion; they were Jumpers or Shakers or something themselves; he might send her to the Sacré Cœur for a year or two."
"If he be gone to be shot, what use would the Spiffler dot be?" said Lady Hilda, with coolest calm, as on a subject not even of most remote interest, and she went on glazing a corner of the draperies of her St. Ursula with carmine.
"The marriage was proposed to him, I know," continued Madame Mila, unheeded. "The Featherleighs undertook it, but he refused point blank. 'Je ne me vends pas,' was all he said. It was very rude, and really that little Spiffler might be made something of; those very tiny creatures never look vulgar, and are so easy to dress; as it is, I dare say Furstenberg will take her, if Nina will let him; it is on the tapis, and Della Rocca won't come back alive, I suppose—isn't it a hare-brained thing to do?—there are gendarmes to look after the brigands, but it seems he has some fancy because they were his own people that suffered—but no doubt he told you all about it, as you and he are such friends."
​"He merely said he was going to Sicily," said the Lady Hilda, languidly, still glazing her St. Ursula.
Madame Mila eyed her curiously.
"You look very pale, dear; I think you paint too much, and read too much," she said, affectionately. "I wish you had tried to persuade him into this Spiffler affair; it would be just the marriage for him, and a girl of seventeen may be drilled into anything, especially when she has small bones and little colour and good teeth; if Furstenberg gets her he will soon train her into good form—only he will gamble away all her money, let them tie it up as they may; and they can't tie it up very much if they want to make a high marriage. Good men won't sacrifice themselves unless they get some control of the fortune. They wouldn't have tied it at all with Della Rocca. Wouldn't the little Spiffler have been better for him than Sicily?"
"It depends upon taste," said the Lady Hilda, changing her brushes.
"Very odd taste," said Madame Mila. "They say Pibro always cuts the heads off the men he ​takes, and sends them into Palermo—the heads you know—with lemons in their mouths like boars; isn't it horrible? And Della Rocca intends going up after the monster in his very fastnesses upon the mountains! Fancy that beautiful head of his!——— Really, dear, you do look very ill: when will you go to London?"
"Oh, some time next week."———
She went to the window and opened it; the room swam round her, the sounds of the streets grew dull upon her ears.
"I wish you wouldn't go till after the races," said Madame Mila, placidly. "I mean to stay. The place is really very nice, though one does see the same people too often. Fancy poor Paolo ending like John the Baptist—the head in the charger, you know—I wonder you let him go, for you had a great deal of influence over him, and say what you like, the Spiffler girl would have been better. How can you keep that window open, with the tramontana blowing?—thanks so much for lending me the horses—goodness! what is the matter?"
Madame Mila paused frightened; for the first ​time in all her life Lady Hilda, leaning against the strong north wind, had lost her consciousness and had fainted.
"How very strange people are," thought Madame Mila, when an hour later her cousin had recovered herself, and had attributed her weakness to the chloral at night and the scent of her oil paints. "If she cared for him like that, why didn't she keep him when she had got him?—she might have hung him to her skirt like her châtelaine; nobody would ever have said anything; I do begin to think that with all her taste, and all her cleverness, she has, after all, not so very much savoir faire."
No one had much savoir faire to Madame Mila's mind who did not manage always to enjoy themselves without scruples and also without scenes.
The house in London was ordered to be kept ready night and day, but no one went to occupy it. M. Camille Odissot, stimulated by dread of his patroness's daily arrival in Paris, worked marvels of celerity upon the ballroom walls, and ​drew with most exquisite precision bands of Greek youths and maidens in the linked mazes of the dance, but none went to admire his efforts and execution. No fashionable news- papers announced the Lady Hilda's arrival in either city; she stayed on and on in Floralia.
"When I know that he is safe out of Sicily I will go," she said to herself; and let the piles of letters and invitation cards lie and accumulate as they would.
She ceased to paint, and left the St. Ursula unfinished; he had sketched it out for her on the panel, and had first tinted it en grisaille. She had not the courage to go on with it; she changed her mode of life, and rode or drove all the day long in the sweet fresh spring weather. When she was not in the open air she felt suffocated. The danger which he ran was no mere exaggeration of her cousin's malicious inventiveness, but was a fact, true and ghastly enough; no one heard of or from him, but his friends said that it was the most fatal madness that had led him to risk his life in the fastnesses of the Sicilian thieves.
"It is sheer suicide," they said around her. ​"What had he to do there?—if the law cannot enforce itself, leave it alone in its impotency. But he had some idea that because his own villages were amongst those who suffered most, it was his place to go there and do what the law cannot do:—he was always Quixotic, poor Paolo. The last thing heard of him was that he had left Palermo with an escort of men whom he had chosen and paid himself, and had gone up towards the mountains. His dead body will be the first tidings that we have; the monster Pibro has spies in all directions, and holds that district in a perfect reign of terror."
She went out into society as Easter came, and heard all that they said, and gave no sign of what she suffered. Worth sent her new marvels of the spring, and she wore them, and was endlessly courted and envied, and quoted and wondered at. She was a little chillier and more cynical than ever, and women observed with pleasure that she was looking ill and growing too thin, which would spoil her beauty. That was all. But she had never thought such pain possible in life as she endured now.
​"If he die it is I who will have killed him," she said in her own heart night and day.
Once she found herself in her long lonely rides near Palestrina, and met the old steward, and recognised him, and went into the sad, silent, deserted house; and listened to the old man's stories of his beloved lord's boyhood and manhood, and of the people's clinging feudal attachment to him, and of his devotion to them in the time of the cholera pestilence.
"There is not an old charcoal burner or a little goatherd on the estates that would not give his life for Prince Paolo," the steward said to her, crying like a child because there was no news from Sicily.
The same evening she went to a great Pasqua ball at the Trasimene villa. As they fastened the diamonds over her hair and in her bosom she felt to hate the shining, senseless, soulless stones;—they were the emblem of the things for which she had lost him; and at that very hour, for ought they knew, he might be lying dead on some solitary shore by the fair blue sea of Theocritus!
​With a heart sick with terror and uncertainty she went to the brilliant crowds of the Trasimene house; to the talk that was so frivolous and tedious, to the dances she never joined in, to the homage she was so tired of, to the monotonies and personalities and trivialities that make up society.
M. de St. Louis hurried up to her:
"Madame, quelle chance!—our new Herakles has slain his Dragon. Maremma has just had telegrams from Palermo. Della Rocca has positively captured the scoundrel Pibro, and taken him into the city, much wounded, but alive, and in the king's gaol by this time. A fine thing to have done, is it not? Of course we shall all praise it, since it has succeeded; although, in truth, a madder exploit never was attempted. Paolo was ten days in the mountains living on a few beans and berries: he has received no hurt whatever; I should think they will give him the Grand Cordon of the Santissima Annunziata. It is really a superb thing to have done. The monster has been the terror of that district for ten years. Palermo went utterly mad with joy. It ​is quite a pity there is no Ariosto to celebrate such a feat. It is very Ariosto-like. Indeed, all the best Italians are so. Englishmen have long ceased to be in any manner Shakesperian; but Italians remain like their poets."
The Duc wandered away into the subtlest and most discursive analysis of the Ariostian school and of the national characteristics which it displayed and was nurtured on; but she had no ear to hear it:
Outwardly she sat indifferent and calm, but her brain and her heart were in tumult with the sweetest, loftiest, grandest pride that she had ever known—pride without egotism, without vanity, without a thought of self; true pride, exultant in heroism, not the arrogant pride of self-culture, of self-worship, of self-love, not the paltry pride of rank and acquisition and physical perfection, not the pride of which all the while she had been half contemptuous herself. And then—his life was safe!
Yet, had he stood before her then she must have given him the same answer—at least, she thought so.
​"What a fine thing to have done!" said Madame Mila, pausing by her in the middle of a waltz, with her brocade train ablaze with gold.
"And now he can come back and marry the Spiffler girl. What do you say, Duc?"
"He will never marry la petite Spiffler," said the Duc, "nor any one else," he added, with a glance of meaning at Lady Hilda.
All eyes turned upon her. She played idly with her fan—one painted long ago by Watteau.
"M. della Rocca has succeeded, so it is heroism," she said, calmly. "Had he failed, I suppose it would have been foolhardiness."
"Of course," said the Duc. "Surely, Madame, Failure cannot expect to use the same dictionary as Success?"
"He must have the Santissima Annunziata, and marry the big Spiffler dot," said Madame Mila.
"Nay, Comtesse, that were bathos indeed, to make la petite Spiffler cousine du roi! Anyhow, let us rejoice that he is living, and that the old Latin race is still productive of heroes. I suppose we shall have details the day after to-morrow."
​"Whatever could he do it for?" said Madame Mila, as she whirled away again in the encircling arm of her Maurice: to Madame Mila such trifles as duty, patriotism, or self-sacrifice could not possibly be any motive power amongst rational creatures. "Whatever could he do it for?—I suppose to soften Hilda. But he must know very little about her; she hates anything romantic; you heard she called it foolhardy. He never will be anything to her, not if he try for ten years. She cares about him after her fashion, but she cares much more about herself."
Lady Hilda did not sleep that night.
She did not even lie down; dry-eyed and with fever in her veins, she sat by the window watching the bright pale gold of the morning widen over the skies, and the sea-green depths of the river catch the first sun-rays and mirror them.
She was so proud of him—ah heaven, so proud! The courage of her temper answered to the courage of his action. It was Heraklean—it was Homeric—that going forth single-handed ​to do what the law could not or would not do, and set free from tyranny of brute force those poor tillers of the soil who could not help themselves. The very folly and madness of that utter disregard of peril moved her to reverence; she who had all her life been environed with the cool, calm, cautious, and circumspect customs of the world.
For one moment it seemed to her possible to renounce everything for his sake. For one moment her own passion for the mere gauds and pomps and possessions of the world looked to her beside the simplicity and self-sacrifice of his own life so poor and mean that she shrank from it in disgust. For one moment she said to herself—"Love was enough."
He had been ready to give up his life for a few poor labourers, who had no other claim on him than that they lived upon the soil he owned; and she who loved him had not the courage to renounce mere worldly riches for his sake. She hated herself, and yet she could not change herself. She cared for power, for supremacy, for indulgence, for extravagance; ​she dreaded to hear the tittering mockery of the women she had eclipsed so long at all her present weakness; it was all so poor, so base, so unworthy, yet it enchained her: the world had been her religion; no one casts off a creed long held without hard and cruel strife.
"Oh, my love, how far beneath you I am!" she thought, she whose pride had been a byeword, and whose superb vanity had been an invulnerable armour.
She could have kneeled down and kissed his hands for very humility; yet she could not resolve to yield.
"I might see him once more, before I go," she thought, and so coward-like she put the hour of decision from her. They must part, but she might see him once more first.
She would go away of course, and her life in the Winter City would be with the things of the past, and she would grow used to the pain of dead passion, and feel it less with time—other women did, and why not she?
So she said to herself; and yet at moments a sort ​of despair appalled her: what would her future be? Only one long empty void, in whose hollowness the "pleasures" of the world would rattle like dead bones. She began to understand that for a great love there is no death possible. It is like Ahasuerus the Jew: it must live on in torment for ever.
And how she had smiled at all these things when others had spoken of them!
The days passed slowly one by one; the beautiful city was in its spring glory, and ran over with the blossoms of flowers, as though it were the basket that Persephone let fall. The news-sheets were full of this deed which he had done in Sicily; she bought them all, down to the tawdriest little sheet that held his name, and read the well-known story again and again a hundred and ten hundred times; his friends expected him to arrive in the town each day, but no one heard anything direct from himself.
"It is strange he writes to none of us," said Maremma; "can anything have happened?"
"Oh, no; the papers would know it," said the Duc de St. Louis.
​She overheard them, and listened with dry lips and a beating heart.
Why did he write to no one? The news-sheets had announced that he had left Palermo for Floralia.
"He may be coming back by the marshes," someone else suggested; "he is reclaiming land there."
Perhaps he stayed away, she thought, because he had heard that she still remained in his native city.
It was mid-April. Madame Mila was organising picnics under old Etruscan walls, and alfresco dinners in villa gardens, and she and her kind were driving out on the tops of drags, and playing baccarat upon anemone-studded lawns by moonlight, and driving in again, at or after midnight, singing Offenbach choruses, and going to the big Café in the town for supper and champagnes; be it in winter or summer, spring or autumn, town or country, youth or middle-age, Madame Mila and her kind, contrive to make no difference in their manner of life whatever; they would sing Schneider's songs in the Tombs of the ​Prophets, they would eat lobster salad on Mount Olivet, and they would scatter their cigar ash over Vaucluse, Marathon, the Campo Santo, or the grave at Ravenna with equal indifference; they are always amused, and defy alike the seasons and the sanctities to stop them in their amusement.
It was mid-April, and with the beginning of May would come the races, and with the races the Winter City would become the Summer City, and the winter-fashion always fled with one bound to fresh fields and pastures new, and left the town to silence, sunshine, roses, fruits, its own populace with their summer songs and summer skies, and perhaps here and there an artist or a poet, or some such foolish person, who loved it best so in its solitude.
"Do come with us, Hilda," said Madame Mila one mid-April morning.
Madame Mila was attired in the simplest morning costume of cream-hued Sicilienne covered with écru lace, and she had a simple country Dorothy hat of cream-coloured velvet, lined bleu-de-ciel, with wreaths of delicate nemophilæ and convolvuli and floating feathers, ​set on one side of her head; Lancret might have painted her on a fan, or Fragonard on a cabinet; she was just going to drive out with five carriages full of her friends to a picnic at Guido Salvareo's villa; they were to dine there, play lansquenet there, and come back in the small hours; they had all postillions, silk-jacketted, powdered, and with ribboned straw hats; the horses were belled, and the bells were jingling in the street; Madame Mila was in the most radiant spirits; she had won five hundred napoleons the night before, and had them all to adventure over again to-night.
"Do come with us, Hilda," she urged. "You do nothing but go those stupid long drives by yourself; it is very bad for you; and it will be charming to-day; Salvareo has such taste; it is really quite romantic to sit upon those anemones, and have the goats come and stare at you; and he always does things so well, and his cook is so good. Do come with us; I am sure it would do you good."
Lady Hilda looked up from the S. Ursula, which she was finishing:
​"My dear Mila!—you know perfectly well how I detest that kind of thing. Teresa's songs, drag seats, and eager efforts to imitate the worst kind of women!—go to it, if it amuse you; but, with all gratitude, allow me to decline."
"How disagreeable you are!" said Madame Mila, pettishly. "One must do something with oneself all these long days: if it were Palestrina, I suppose you would go."
Lady Hilda deigned to give no reply. She touched in the gold background of her Saint. Madame Mila looked at her with irritation; no one likes to be despised, and she knew that her cousin did very nearly despise her, and all the ways and means of enjoyment in which her heart delighted.
Lady Hilda, tranquilly painting there, annoyed her inexpressibly. Why should any woman be above the box-seats of drags and all their concomitant attractions?
She took her revenge.
"Do as you like of course, but you always do do that," she said carelessly. "There are two seats vacant. St. Louis and Carlo Maremma were to have gone with us, but they went to Della ​Rocca instead. Oh, didn't you know it?—he reached Palestrina two days ago very ill with marsh fever. It is fever and cholera and ague and all sorts of dreadful things all together. Isn't it odd?—to have escaped all that danger in Sicily, and, then get this in the swamps coming back? Nobody knew it till late last night, when his steward got frightened, and sent in for the physicians. He is very bad, I believe—not likely to live. You know they go down under that—sometimes in twenty-four hours."
Lady Hilda seemed to reach her at a single step, though the distance of the room was between them.
"Is that true?—or is it some jest?"
Madame Mila, appalled, looked up into her face.
"It is true, quite true. Oh, Hilda, take your hand off; you hurt me. How could I tell you would care about it like that."
"Is it true?" muttered her cousin again.
"Indeed, indeed it is," she whimpered trembling. "Oh let me go, you spoil my lace. If you cared for the man like that, why didn't ​you keep him when you had got him? I know you could not have married him, but nobody would have said anything."
Lady Hilda put her out into the corridor, and closed the door and locked it within.
Madame Mila, frightened, astonished, and outraged, went down to her Maurice, and the drag, and the ribboned and powdered postillions, and the horses with their jingling bells and plaited tails; the gay calvacade rattled off along the river-street towards the city gates as the clocks tolled three.
Lady Hilda and S. Ursula were left alone.
Within less than half-an-hour the black horses were harnessed and bore their mistress towards Palestrina. Never before moved by impulse, impulse alone governed her now; the impulse of despair and remorse. She cared nothing who saw her or who knew; for once she had forgotten herself.
The long drive seemed eternity; she thought the steep winding mountain roads would never end; when Palestrina came in sight, pale and stately against its dark background of forest trees, ​she felt as if her heart would break. He had gone through all those perils afar off, only to be dying there!
It was five o'clock by the convent chimes when they reached the crest of the hill on which the old place stood. The lovely hillside was covered with the blue and white of the wild hyacinths and gold of the wild daffodils. The lofty stone pines spread their dark green roofs above her head. Flocks of birds were singing, in the myrtle thickets, their sweet shrill evensong. The shining valley lay below like a cloud of amber light. The surpassing loveliness, the intense stillness of it all, made the anguish within her unbearable. What she had missed all her life long!———
There was a chapel not far from the house set in the midst of the pines, with the cross on its summit touching the branches, and its doorway still hung round with the evergreens and flowers of its passed Easter feasts. There were men and women and children standing about on the turf in front of it; they were most of them crying bitterly.
​She stopped her horses there, and called a woman to her, but her lips would not frame the question. The woman guessed it:—
"Yes, my beautiful lady," she said, with many tears. "We have been praying for Prince Paolo. He is very ill, up yonder. The marsh sickness has got him. May the dear Mother of God save him to us. But he is dying, they say———"
"We would die in his stead, if the good God would let us," said one of the men, drawing near: the others sobbed aloud.
She put out her hand to the man—the slender proud hand that she had refused to princes. Wondering, he fell on his knee and would have kissed her hand. She drew back in horror.
"Do not kneel to me! I have killed him!" she muttered; and she urged her panting horses forward to the house.
She bade them tell the Duc de St. Louis to come to her upon the terrace. She leaned there tearless, white as death, still as marble; the beautiful, tranquil spring time all around, and the valley shining like gold in the light of the descending sun. It seemed to her that ages passed ​before the soft step of her old friend sounded near her: he was surprised and startled, but he did not show it.
"There is still hope," he hastened to say, ere she could speak. "Within the last hour he is slightly better; they give him quinine constantly. If the chills and shivering do not return, it is just possible that he may live. But———"
His voice faltered in its serenity, and he turned his head away.
"It is not likely?"
Her own voice had scarcely any sound of its natural tone left in it, yet long habit was so strong with her that she spoke calmly.
"It is not likely. This deadly marsh-poison is short and fierce. After the fatigue and fasting in Sicily it has taken fearful hold on him. But in an hour or two they will know—one way or the other."
"I will stay here. Come and tell me—often. And if—if the worst come—let me see him. Leave me now."
He looked at her, hesitated, then left her as she asked. He guessed all that passed in her ​thoughts; all that had gone before: and he knew that she was not a woman who would bear pity, and that she was best left thus in solitude.
Like a caged animal she paced to and fro the long length of the stone terrace.
She was all alone.
The flower-like radiance of the declining day shone everywhere around, the birds sang, the dreamy bells rang in the Ave Maria from hill to hill, all was so still, so peaceful, so beautiful; yet with the setting of the sun, his life might go out in darkness.
In her great misery, her soul was purified. The fire that consumed her burned away the dross of the world, the alloy of selfishness and habit and vain passions. "Oh, God! give me his life, and I will give him mine!" she cried in her heart all through those terrible hours; and yet recoiled in terror from the uselessness and daring of her prayer. What had she ever done that she could merit its fulfilment?
He might have been hers, all hers; and she had loved the base things of a worldly greatness better than himself. And now he lay ​dying there, as the sun dropped westward and night came.
She felt no chill of evening- She felt neither hunger nor thirst. Crowds of weeping people hung about in the gardens below. She heard nothing that passed round her, save the few words of her old friend, when from time to time he came and told her that there was no change.
The moon rose, and its light fell on the stone of the terrace, and through the vast deserted chambers opening from it; on the grey worn marbles of the statues, and on the pale angels of the frescoes.
It was ten o'clock: the chimes of the convent above on the mountains told every hour. Unceasingly she paced to and fro, to and fro, like some mad, or wounded creature. The silence and serenity of the night, the balmy fragrance of it, and the silvery light, were so much mockery of her wretchedness. She had never thought that there could be agony like this———and yet from heaven no sign!
Nearly another hour had passed before her friend approached her again. She caught the ​sound of his step in the darkness; her heart stood still; her blood was changed to ice, frozen with the deadliness of the most deadly fear on earth; she could only look at him with wide-opened, strained, blind eyes.
For the first time he smiled:—
"Take comfort," he said, softly. "He has fallen asleep, he is less exhausted, they say that he may live. How cold you are!—this night will kill you!"
She dropped down upon her knees on the stone pavement, and all her bowed frame was shakened by convulsive weeping.
He drew aside in reverence and left her alone in the light of the moon.
When midnight came hope was certain.
The sleep still lasted; the fever had abated, the cold chills had not returned.
She called her old friend to her out into the terrace.
"I will go now. Send to me at daybreak and keep my secret."
"May I tell him nothing?"
"Tell him to come to me—when he is able."
​"Nothing more?"
"No; nothing. He will know———"
"But———"
She turned her face to him in the full moonlight, with the tears of her joy coursing down her cheeks, and he started at the change in her that this one night of suffering had wrought.
"No, say nothing more. But—but—you shall see what my atonement shall be, and my thankfulness."
Then she went away from him softly in the darkness and the fragrance of the April night. The Duc looked after the lights of her carriage with a mist over his own eyes, but he shrugged his shoulders with a sigh.
"Who can ever say that he knows a woman! Who can ever predcit what she will not say, or will not do, or will not be!" he murmured, as he turned and went within to watch beside the bed of his friend, as the stars grew clearer and the dawn approached.
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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