Читать книгу Babylon. Volume 3 - Allen Grant, Griffiths Arthur - Страница 2

As Minna Wroe opened her eyes that morning in the furnished house in the Via Clementina, she could hardly realise even now that she was actually at Rome, and within half-an-hour’s walk of dear Colin.

Yes, that was mainly how the Eternal City, the capital of art, the centre of Christendom, the great museum of all the ages, envisaged itself as of course to the frank barbarism of poor wee Minna’s simple little bosom. Some of us, when we go to Rome, see in it chiefly a vast historical memory – the Forum, the Colosseum, the arch of Titus, the ruined Thermæ, the Palace of the Caesars. Some of us see in it rather a magnificent panorama of ancient and modern art, the Vatican, St. Peter’s, the Apollo, the Aphrodite, the great works of Michael Angelo, and Raphael, and the spacious broad-souled Renaissance painters. Some see in it a modern gimcrack Italian metropolis; some, a fashionable English winter residence; some, a picturesque, quaint old-world mediæval city; some, a Babylon doomed before long to a terrible fiery destruction; and some, a spiritual centre of marvellous activity, with branches that ramify out in a thousand directions over the entire civilised and barbarous world. But Minna Wroe thought of that wonderful composite heterogeneous Rome for the most part merely as the present home and actual arena of Colin Churchill, sculptor, at Number 84 in the Via Colonna.

It had been a grand piece of luck for Minna, the chance that brought her the opportunity of taking that long-looked-for, and much desired journey. To be sure, she had been very happy in her own way down in the pretty little rural Surrey village. Mr. O’Donovan was the kindest and most fatherly old clergyman that ever lived; and though he did bother her just a little now and then with teaching in the Sunday school and conducting the Dorcas society, and taking charge of the Mothers’ meeting, still he was so good and gentle and sympathetic to her at all times, that Minna could easily have forgiven him for twice as much professional zeal as he ever himself displayed in actual reality. Yet for all that, though the place was so pretty, and the work so light, and the four little girls on the whole such nice pleasant well-behaved little mortals, Minna certainly did miss Colin very terribly. Some employers would doubtless have said to themselves when they saw the governess moping and melancholy in spite of all the comfort that was provided for her: ‘Well, what more on earth that girl can possibly be wanting really passes my poor finite comprehension.’ But Mr. O’Donovan knew better. He was one of those people who habitually and instinctively put themselves in the place of others; and when on Sunday mornings after the letter with the twenty-five centesimi stamp had arrived at the rectory, he saw poor Minna moving about the house before church, looking just a trifle tearful, he said to himself with a shake of his dear kindly old broken-nosed head: ‘Ah well, ah well; young people will be young people; and I’ve often noticed that however comfortable a girl of twenty-two may be in all externals, why, God bless my soul, if she’s got a lover five hundred miles away, she can’t help crying a bit about him every now and then – and very natural!’ Minna gratefully observed too, that on all such occasions Mr. O’Donovan treated her with more than his usual consideration, and seemed to understand exactly what it was that made her rather sharper than her wont with the small feelings of the four little ones.

And Mr. O’Donovan never forgot his promise to Minna to look out for a family who were going to Rome and who wanted an English governess. ‘But, bless my soul,’ he thought to himself, ‘who on earth would ever have believed beforehand what a precious difficult thing it is to find a person who fulfils at once both the conditions? People going to Rome, dozens of ‘em; people wanting a governess, dozens of ‘em also; but people going to Rome and wanting a governess, I regret to say, not a soul to be heard of. Sounds just like a Senate House problem, when I was a young fellow at Cambridge: If out of x A’s there are y B’s and z C’s, what are the chances that any B is also a C?

Answer, precious little.’ Indeed, the good old parson even went the length of putting an advertisement into the Guardian twice a year, without saying a word about it to Minna: ‘A Clergyman (beneficed) wishes to recommend highly qualified Young Lady as English nursery Governess to a Family wintering at Rome.’ But he never got a single answer. ‘Dear, dear,’ the kind old gentleman muttered to himself, on each such occasion when the post passed by day after day without bringing him a single one of the expected applications, ‘that’s always the way, unfortunately. Advertise that you want a governess, and you have fifty poor young girls answering at once, wasting a penny stamp a-piece, and waiting eagerly to know whether you’ll be kindly pleased to engage ‘em. Advertise that you want a place as governess, and never a soul will take a moment’s notice of you. Supply and demand, I believe they call it in the newspapers; supply and demand; but in a Christian country one might have imagined they’d have got something more charitable to give us by this time than the bare gospel of Political Economy. When I was young, we didn’t understand Political Economy; and Mr. Malthus, who wrote about it, used to be considered little better than a heathen. Still, I’ve done my duty, as far as I’ve been able; that’s one comfort. And if I can’t succeed in getting a place for George Wroe’s daughter to go and join this wonderful clever lover of hers at Rome (confound the fellow, he’s making a pot of money I see by the papers; why the dickens doesn’t he send over and fetch her?) – well anyhow, dear Lucy’s children are getting the benefit of her attention, meanwhile, and what on earth I should do without her now, I’m sure I haven’t the slightest conception.’

At last, however, after one of these regular six-monthly notices the rector happened to come down to breakfast one morning, and found a letter in a strange foreign-looking hand lying beside his porridge on the dining-room table. He turned it over and looked anxiously at the back: – yes, it was just as he hoped and feared; it bore a London post-mark, and had a Byzantine-look-ing coronet embossed upon it in profuse gilding and brilliantly blazoned heraldic colours. The old man’s heart sank within him. ‘Confound it,’ he said to himself, half-angrily, ‘I do believe I’ve gone and done my duty this time with a regular vengeance. This is an answer to the advertisement at last, and it’s an application from somebody or other to carry off dear little Miss Wroe to Rome as somebody’s governess. Hang it all, how shall I ever manage, at my age too, to accommodate myself to another young woman! I won’t open it now. I can’t open it now. If I open it before prayers and breakfast, and it really turns out to be quite satisfactory, I shall break down over it, I know I shall; and then little Miss Wroe will see I’ve been crying about it, and refuse to leave us – she’s a good girl, and if she knew how much I valued her, she’d refuse to leave us; and so after all she’d never get to join this sculptor son of young Sam Churchill’s that she’s for ever thinking of. I’ll put it away till after breakfast. Perhaps indeed it mayn’t be at all the thing for her – which would be very lucky – no, I mean unlucky; – well, there, there, what a set of miserable selfish wretched creatures we are really, whenever it comes to making even a small sacrifice for one another. Con O’Donovan, my boy, you know perfectly well in your heart of hearts you were half-wishing that that poor girl wasn’t going at last to join her lover that she’s so distracted about; and yet after that, you have the impudence to get up in the pulpit every Sunday morning, and preach a sermon about our duty to others to your poor parishioners – perhaps, even out of the fifth chapter of Matthew, you confounded hypocrite! It seems to me there’s a good deal of truth in that line of Tennyson’s, though it sounds so cynical:

However we brave it out, we men are a little breed!

Upon my soul, when I come to think of it, I’m really and truly quite ashamed of myself.’

Do you ever happen to have noticed that the very men who have the smallest possible leaven of littleness, or meanness, or selfishness, in their own natures are usually the exact ones who most often bitterly reproach themselves for their moral shortcomings in this matter?

When the rector came to open the envelope by-and-by in his own study, he found it contained a letter in French from a Russian countess, then in London, who proposed spending the winter in Italy. ‘Madame had seen M. O’Donovan’s Advertisement in a journal of his country, and would be glad to learn from Monsieur some particulars about the young lady whom he desired to recommend to families. Madame required a governess for one little girl, and proposed a salary of 2,500 francs.’ The old man’s eyes brightened at the idea of so large an offer – one hundred pounds sterling – and then he laid down the letter again, and cried gently to himself, as old people sometimes do, for a few minutes. After that, he reflected that Georgey Wroe’s daughter was a very good girl, and deserved any advancement that he could get for her; and Georgey was a fine young fellow himself, and as clever a hand at managing a small smack in a squall off the Chesil as any fisherman, bar none, in all England. God bless his soul, what a run that was they had together, the night the ‘Sunderbund’ East Indiaman went to pieces off Deadman’s Bay, from Seaton Bar right round the Bill to Lulworth! He could mind even now the way the water broke over the gunwale into Georgey’s face, and how Georgey laughed at the wind, and swore it was a mere breeze, and positively whistled to it. Well, well, he would do what he could for Georgey’s daughter, and he must look out (with a stifled sigh) for some other good girl to take care of Lucy’s precious little ones.

So he sat down and wrote off such a glowing account of Minna’s many virtues to the Russian countess in London – an account mainly derived from his own calm inner belief as to what a perfect woman’s character ought to be made up of – that the Russian countess wrote back to say she would engage Mdlle. Wroe immediately, without even waiting to see her. Till he got that answer, Mr. O’Donovan never said a word about the matter to Minna, for fear she might be disappointed; but as soon as it arrived, and he had furtively dried his eyes behind his handkerchief, lest she should see how sorry he was to lose her, he laid the two letters triumphantly down before her, and said, in a voice which seemed as though he were quite as much interested in the event as she was: ‘There you see, my dear, I’ve found somebody at last for you to go to Rome with.’ Minna’s head reeled and her eyes swam as she read the two letters to herself with some difficulty (for her French was of the strictly school-taught variety); but as soon as she had spelt out the meaning to her own intense satisfaction, she flung her arms round old Mr. O’Donovan’s neck, and kissed him twice fervently. Mr. O’Donovan’s eyes glistened, and he kissed her in return gently on her forehead. She had grown to be to him almost like a daughter, and he loved her so dearly that it was a hard wrench to part from her. ‘And you know, my dear,’ he said to her with fatherly tenderness, ‘you won’t mind my mentioning it to you, I’m sure, because I need hardly tell you how much interest I take in my old friend Georgey’s daughter; but I think it’s just as well the lady’s a foreigner, and especially a Russian, because they’re not so particular, I believe, about the conventionalities of society as our English mothers are apt to be; and you’ll probably get more opportunities of seeing young Churchill when occasion offers than you would have done if you’d happened to have gone abroad with an English family.’

When Minna went away from the country rectory, at very short notice, some three weeks later, Mary the housemaid observed, with a little ill-natured smile to the other village gossips, that it wasn’t before it was time, neither; for the way that that there Miss Wroe, as she called herself, had been carrying on last month or two along of poor old master, and him a clergyman, too, and old enough to know better, but there, what can you expect, for everybody knows what an old gentleman is when a governess or anybody can twist him round her little finger, was that dreadful that really she often wondered whether a respectable girl as was always brought up quite decent and her only a fisherman’s daughter, too, as master hisself admitted, but them governesses, when they got theirselves a little eddication and took a sitooation, was that stuck-up and ridiculous, not but what she made her always keep her place, for that matter, for she wasn’t going to be put down by none of your governesses, setting themselves up to be ladies when they wasn’t no better nor she was, but at any rate it was a precious good thing she was gone now before things hadn’t gone no further, for if she’d stayed, why, of course, there wouldn’t have been nothing left for her to do, as had always lived in proper families, but to go and give notice herself afore she’d stop in such a sitooation.

And Mrs. Upjohn, the doctor’s wife, smiled blandly when Mary spoke to her about it, and said in a grave tone of severe moral censure: ‘Well, there, Mary, you oughtn’t to want to meddle with your master’s business, whatever you may happen to fancy. Not but what Miss Wroe herself certainly did behave in a most imprudent and unladylike manner; and I can’t deny, of course, that she’s laid herself open to every word of what you say about her. But then, you know, Mary, she isn’t a lady; and, after all, what can you expect from such a person?’ To which Mary, having that profound instinctive contempt for her own class which is sometimes begotten among the essentially vulgar by close unconscious introspection, immediately answered: ‘Ah, what indeed!’ and went on unrebuked with her ill-natured gossip. So high and watchful is social morality amid the charming Arcadian simplicity of our outlying English country villages.

But poor little Minna, waking up that very morning in the Via Clementina, never heeded their venomous backbiting one bit, and thought only of going to see her dear Colin. What a surprise it would be to him to see her, to be sure; for Minna, fearful that the scheme might fall through before it was really settled, had written not a word to him about it beforehand, and meant to surprise him by dropping in upon him quite unexpectedly at his studio without a single note of warning.

‘Ah, my dear,’ the countess said to her, when Minna, trembling, asked leave to go out and visit her cousin – that dim relationship, so inevitable among country folk from the same district, had certainly more than once done her good service – ‘you have then a parent at Rome, a sculptor? Yes, yes, I recall it; that good Mr. O’Donovan made mention to me of this parent. He prayed me to let you have the opportunity from time to time of visiting him. These are our first days at Rome. For the moment, Olga will demand her vacations: she will wish to distract herself a little with the town, before she applies herself seriously to her studies of English. Let us say to-day, then: let us say this very morning. You can go, my child: you can visit your parent: and if his studio encloses anything of artistic, you pass me the word, I go to see it. But if they have the instinct of the family strong, these English! I find that charming; it is delicious: it is all that there is of most pure and poetical. She wishes to visit her cousin, who is a sculptor and whom she has not seen, it is now a long time; and she blushes and trembles like a French demoiselle who comes from departing the day itself from the gates of the convent. One would say, a lover. I find it most admirable, this affection of the family, this lasting reminiscence of the distant relations. We others in Russia, we have it too: we love the parent: but not with so much empressement. I find that trait there altogether essentially English.’

Mrs. Upjohn would have considered the countess ‘scarcely respectable,’ and would have avoided her acquaintance carefully, unless indeed she happened to be introduced to her by the squire’s lady, in which case, of course, her perfect propriety would have been sufficiently guaranteed: but, after all, which of them had the heart the most untainted? To the pure all things are pure: and contrariwise.

So Minna hastened out into those unknown streets of Rome, and by the aid of her self-taught Italian (which was a good deal better than her French, so potent a tutor is love) she soon found her way down the Corso, and off the side alley into the narrow sunless Via Colonna. She followed the numbers down to the familiar eighty-four of Colin’s letters, and there she saw upon the door a little painted tin-plate, bearing in English the simple inscription: ‘Mr. C. Churchill’s Studio.’ Minna’s heart beat fast for a moment as she mounted the stairs unannounced, and stood within the open door of Colin’s modelling room.

A few casts and other sculptor’s properties filled up the space between the door and the middle of the studio. Minna paused a second, and looked timidly from behind them at the room beyond. She hardly liked to come forward at once and claim acquaintance: it seemed so strange and unwomanly so to announce herself, now that she had actually got to face it. A certain unwonted bashfulness appeared somehow or other to hold her back; and Minna, who had her little superstitions still, noted it in passing as something ominous. There were two people visible in the studio – both men; and they were talking together quite earnestly, Minna could see, about somebody else who was obviously hidden from her by the Apollo in the foreground. One of them was a very handsome young man in a brown velvet coat, with a loose Rembrandtesque hat of the same stuff stuck with artistic carelessness on one side of his profuse curls: her heart leaped up at once as she recognised with a sudden thrill that that was Colin – transfigured and glorified a little by success, but still the same dear old Colin as ever, looking the very image of a sculptor, as he stood there, one arm poised lightly on his hip, and turning towards his companion with some wonderful grace that no other race of men save only artists can ever compass. Stop, he was speaking again now; and Minna, all unconscious of listening or prying, bent forward to catch the sound of those precious words as Colin uttered them.

‘She’s splendid, you know, Winthrop,’ Colin was saying enthusiastically, in a voice that had caught a slight Italian trill from Maragliano, unusual on our sterner English lips: ‘she’s grand, she’s beautiful, she’s terrible, she’s magnificent. Upon my word, in all my life I never yet saw any woman one-half so glorious or so Greek as Cecca. I’m proud of having discovered her; immensely proud. I claim her as my own property, by right of discovery. A lot of other fellows would like to inveigle her away from me; but they won’t get her: Cecca’s true metal, and she sticks to her original inventor. What a woman she is, really! Now did you ever see such a perfectly glorious arm as that one?’

Minna reeled, almost, as she stood there among the casts and properties, and felt half inclined on the spur of the moment to flee away unseen, and never again speak or write a single word to that perfidious Colin. Cecca, indeed! Cecca! Cecca! Who on earth was this woman Cecca, she would like to know; and what on earth did the faithless Colin ever want with her? Splendid, grand, beautiful, glorious, terrible, magnificent! Oh, Colin, Colin, how could you break her poor little heart so? Should she go back at once to the countess, and not even let Colin know she had ever come to Rome at all to see him? It was too horrible, too sudden, too crushing, too unexpected!

The other man looked towards the unseen Cecca – Minna somehow felt in her heart that Cecca was there, though she couldn’t see her – and answered with an almost imperceptible American accent, ‘She’s certainly very beautiful, Churchill, very beautiful. My dear fellow, I sincerely congratulate you.’

Congratulate you! What! had it come to that? Oh horror! oh shame! had Colin been grossly deceiving her? Had he not only made love in her absence to that black-eyed Italian woman of whom she had always been so much afraid, but had he even made her an offer of marriage, without ever mentioning a word about it to her, Minna? The baseness, the deceit, the wickedness of it! And yet – this Minna thought with a sickening start – was it really base, was it really deceitful, was it really wicked? Colin had never said he would marry her; he had never been engaged to her – oh no, during all those long weary years of doubt and hesitation she had always known he wasn’t engaged to her – she had known it, and trembled. Yes, he was free; he was his own master; he could do as he liked: she was only his little cousin Minna: what claim, after all, had she upon him?

At that moment Colin turned, and looked almost towards her, without seeing her. She could have cried out ‘Colin!’ as she saw his beautiful face and his kindly eyes – too kindly to be untrue, surely – turned nearly upon her; but Cecca, Cecca, the terrible unseen Cecca, somehow restrained her. And Cecca, too, had actually accepted him. Didn’t the Yankee man he called Winthrop say, ‘I congratulate you’? There was only one meaning possible to put upon such a sentence. Accept him! Why, how could any woman conceivably refuse him? as he moved forward there with his delicate clear-cut face, a face in which the aesthetic temperament stood confessed so unmistakably – Minna could hardly blame this unknown Cecca if she fell in love with him. But for herself – oh, Colin, Cohn, Colin, it was too cruel.

She would at least see Cecca before she stole away unperceived for ever; she would see what manner of woman this was that had enticed away Colin Churchill’s love from herself, if indeed he had ever loved her, which was now at least far more than doubtful. So she moved aside gently behind the clay figures, and came in sight of the third person.

It was the exact Italian beauty of her long-nursed girlish terrors! A queenly dark woman, with supple statuesque figure and splendidly set head, was standing before the two young artists in an attitude half studied pose, half natural Calabrian peasant gracefulness. Her brown neck and arms were quite bare; her large limbs were scarcely concealed below by a short and clinging sculpturesque kirtle. She was looking towards Colin with big languishing eyes, and her smile – for she was smiling – had something in it of that sinister air that northerners often notice among even the most beautiful women of the Mediterranean races. It was plain that she couldn’t understand what her two admirers were saying in their foreign language; but it was plain also that she knew they were praising her extraordinary beauty, and her eyes flashed forth accordingly with evident pride and overflowing self-satisfaction. Cecca was beautiful, clearly beautiful, both in face and figure, with a rich, mature southern beauty (though in years perhaps she was scarcely twenty), and Minna was forced in spite of herself to admire her form; but she felt instinctively there was something about the girl that she would have feared and dreaded, even if she hadn’t heard Colin Churchill speaking of her with such unstinted and unhesitating admiration. So this was Cecca! So this was Cecca! And so this was the end, too, of all her long romantic day-dream!

As she stood there, partly doubting whether to run away or not, Cecca caught sight of her half hidden behind the Apollo, and turning to Colin, cried out sharply in a cold, ringing, musical voice as clear and as cold as crystal, ‘See, see; a signorina! She waits to speak with you.’

Colin looked round carelessly, and before Minna could withdraw his eyes met hers in a sudden wonder.

‘Minna!’ he cried, rushing forward eagerly to meet her, ‘Minna! Minna! Why, it must be Minna! How on earth did you manage to get to Rome, little woman? and why on earth didn’t you let me know beforehand you were really coming?’

He tried to kiss her as he spoke, but Minna, half doubtful what she ought to do, with swimming brain and tearful eyes, held him off mechanically by withdrawing herself timidly a little, and gave him her hand instead with strange coldness, much to his evident surprise and disappointment.

‘She’s too modest to kiss me before Winthrop and Cecca,’ Colin thought to himself a little nervously; ‘but no matter – Winthrop, this is my cousin from England, Miss Wroe, that I’ve so often spoken to you about.’

His cousin from England! His cousin!! His cousin!!! Ah, yes, that was all he meant by it nowadays clearly. He wanted to kiss her, but merely as a cousin; all his heart, it seemed, was only for this creature he called Cecca, who stood there scowling at her so savagely from under her great heavy eyebrows. He had gone to Rome, as she feared so long ago, and had fallen into the clutches of that dreaded terrible Italian woman.

‘Well, Minna,’ Colin said, looking at her so tenderly that even Minna herself half believed he must be still in earnest, ‘and so you’ve come to Italy, have you? My dear little girl, why didn’t you write and tell me all about it? You’ve broken in upon me so unexpectedly.’ (‘So I see,’ thought Minna.) ‘Why didn’t you write and let me know beforehand you were coming to see me?

Minna’s heart prompted her inwardly to answer with truth, ‘Because I wanted to surprise you, Colin;’ but she resisted the natural impulse, much against the grain, and answered instead with marked chilliness, ‘Because I didn’t know my movements were at all likely to interest you.’

As they two spoke, Hiram Winthrop noticed half unconsciously that Cecca’s eyes were steadily riveted upon the newcomer, and that the light within them had changed instantaneously from the quiet gleam of placid self-satisfaction to the fierce glare of rising anger and jealous suspicion.

Colin still held Minna’s hand half doubtfully in his, and looked with his open face all troubled into her pretty brown eyes, wondering vaguely what on earth could be the meaning of this unexpected coldness of demeanour.

‘Tell me at least how you got here, little woman,’ he began again in his soft, gentle voice, with quiet persuasiveness. ‘Whatever brought you here, Minna, I’m so glad, so very glad to see you. Tell me how you came, and how long you’re going to stop with me.’

Minna sat down blankly on the one chair that stood in the central area of the little studio, not because she wanted to stay there any longer, but because she felt as if her trembling knees were positively giving way beneath her. ‘I’ve taken a place as governess to a Russian girl, Colin,’ she answered shortly; ‘and I’ve come to Rome with my pupil’s mother.’

Colin felt sure by the faintness of her voice that there was something very serious the matter. ‘Minna dearest,’ he whispered to her half beneath his breath, ‘you aren’t well, I’m certain. I’ll send away my friend and my model, and then you must tell me all about it, like a dear good little woman.’

Minna started, and her face flushed suddenly again with mounting colour. ‘Your model,’ she cried, pointing half contemptuously towards the scowling Cecca. ‘Your model! Is that woman over there a model, then?’

‘Yes, certainly,’ Colin answered lightly.

‘This lady’s a model, Minna. We call her Cecca – that’s short for Francesca, you know – and she’s my model for a statue of a Spartan maiden I’m now working upon.’

But Cecca, though she couldn’t follow the words, had noticed the contemptuous tone and gesture with which Minna had scornfully spoken of ‘that woman,’ and she knew at once in her hot Italian heart that she stood face to face with a natural enemy. An enemy and a rival. For Cecca, too, had in her own way her small fancies and her bold ambitions.

‘She’s very beautiful, isn’t she?’ Hiram Winthrop put in timidly, for he saw with his keen glance that Cecca’s handsome face was growing every moment blacker and blacker, and he wanted to avert the coming explosion.

‘Well, not so very beautiful to my mind,’ Minna answered, with studied coolness, putting her head critically a little on one side, and staring at the model as if she had been made of plaster of Paris; ‘though I must say you gentlemen seemed to be admiring her immensely when I came into the room a minute or two ago. I confess she doesn’t exactly take my own personal fancy.’

‘What is the signorina saying?’ Cecca broke in haughtily, in Italian. She felt sure from the scornful tone of Minna’s voice that it must at least be something disparaging.

‘She says you are beautiful, Signora Cecca,’ Colin answered hurriedly, with a sidelong deprecatory glance at Minna. ‘Bella bella, bella, bellissima.’

‘Bellissima, si, bellissima,’ Minna echoed, half frightened, she knew not why; for she felt dimly conscious in her own little mind that they were all three thoroughly afraid in their hearts of the beautiful, imperious Italian woman.

‘It is a lie,’ Cecca murmured to herself quietly. 4 But it doesn’t matter. She was saying that she didn’t admire me, and the Englishman and the American tried to stop her. The sorceress! I hate her!’