Читать книгу Because of These Things - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 11

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"Francis Moutray was at the fête to-night and you were with him," said the Contessa Vittoria.

They had returned from the Palazzo Rossi, and were in one of their own great gilt-and-crimson rooms lit by the rapidly increasing dawn.

Emilia had taken her silks, her yawns, her laughter, upstairs; the pages and maids who tended the magnificence of all three ladies had disappeared in the corridors of the quiet palace, and Giovanna was alone with her mother.

She sat by an agate and ormolu table placed against the wall; it bore a lamp of Florentine copper that diffused a ruddy light over her figure, saving her from the chill touch of the dawn.

The Contessa stood in the centre of the room. She wore black and scarlet, and held in her hand the velvet fantastic beak-shaped mask she had worn that evening; her attitude was one of anger and pride, but in her dark eyes was a look of pain and yearning.

"I was with him in the garden," replied Giovanna in a dead voice; there were purple shadows beneath her eyes, and her lips had a swollen, blistered look against the creamy colourlessness of her face.

"I know, I saw, but too late to prevent it," said Vittoria. "You are a fool, Vanna." She spoke with conviction for she knew that only a few such indiscretions, as Giovanna had committed to-night, had cost her the almost royal match she might have had and made her glad to accept the Colonna. "I did not know that he was to be there tonight or you would not have gone, Vanna."

Giovanna did not trouble to betray Mr. Middleton. She was too weary, too bewildered, too bruised in her soul, to give much heed to what her mother said; her mind was fiercely engaged on her own problems.

The Contessa gazed at her intently.

"Are you a fool, child?" she asked.

Giovanna made a helpless movement of her head and hand.

"I—love—him," she stammered; "he has gone because there is so much between us—to be bridged. What shall I do?"

"Forget him," said Vittoria quickly; "choose another gallant."

Giovanna shook her head; she felt alien to her mother, impatient of her talk. She wished, as she had wished ever since Francis had left her, to be alone, to think out by herself the amazing gain and loss that had come into her life; her mother seemed to her to belong to another world and to be arguing in a foreign tongue.

The Contessa waited a while but, getting no word from Giovanna, spoke again.

"If he has gone there is nothing more for either of us to do or say."

"He has gone," said Giovanna, "because of God."

"Of God?" Vittoria started and made the sign of the cross—then she understood. "We must be grateful," she said, "that he fears God."

Giovanna stood up.

"It has changed everything," she answered heavily—"all my life. I do not understand the meaning of all of it—but it seems to me that love—that lasts—is a terrible thing."

Vittoria looked at her with wise, wearied eyes.

"What can you know of love that lasts?" she asked.

"I know I shall never care for anyone else," returned the girl calmly. "I told you—I do not even see anyone else. Do you not know this feeling? It is as if a curtain had been dropped in front of all the world and he and I were alone—the only real things. Is not love a real thing—stronger, perhaps, than God?"

The Contessa shivered.

"You speak terrible words—but I will forget them—since you have sent this man away."

"No," replied Giovanna, "he left me."

"But you let him go? You saw the madness, and let him go?"

"Yes," said Giovanna.

"Then," answered the Contessa with her magnificent air of the great lady, "there is surely nothing more for either of us to say. Come to me with tales of another cavalier and you will not find me unsympathetic. But you must have a husband by this time next month, Vanna," she added firmly; and, indeed, she had already decided that a girl liable to such wild and violent fancies was not safe unwed.

Giovanna pulled the chain of the red copper lamp, the flame sank out, leaving her standing in shadow, for the light of the dawn had not yet encroached upon her, and only touched into a faint colour the extreme edges of her silk skirts.

"Why are you silent with me?" asked the Contessa, and her face was haggard, her voice sharp.

"There is nothing to say," returned the girl on a note of suppressed passion; "he has left me."

"So he says—but methought that he was to have left Bologna to- night. He delays."

The Contessa continued to gaze with apprehension, suspicion, and tenderness at the dimly seen figure of her daughter.

Giovanna, with the instinct of one nurtured in an atmosphere of intrigue, at once divined her mother's meaning.

"We are in no conspiracy to deceive you," she replied.

The Contessa moved toward her, the rich domino over her arm, the mask in her hand, and the silver lace gleaming faintly on her befurbelowed dress; her beauty, that had been a delight and a ruin to so many, had a definite look of age, a chill over it, like snow over flowers.

"Are you not happy with me, Vanna?" she asked in a low voice. "Do you not care for me a little—?"

"Oh, you know—" trembled the younger woman. "But—for the moment—this other feeling—Ah, I fear I have undertaken something beyond my strength!"

She ended the broken sentences by putting her hands before her face and her face to the wall.

The Contessa went up to her, bent over her, embraced her. If she was, or had ever been, what the worst of her enemies said of her, the look and gesture of unselfish affection she used now would, at least for a while, have ennobled her above her sins.

"Carissima," she cried, "Christ and the Holy Virgin help thee!"

Giovanna was unresponsive in her grasp. She was thinking of Francis, of his kiss, of his farewell—all her pulses beat to that theme; all that was not he or of his, was an interference, an intrusion; and she could not give her mother her confidence, for she recalled how she had spoken of Francis yesterday.

The tears came to the Contessa's eyes as she felt the stiff, unyielding young body in her embrace.

"Has he, in a few short hours, displaced me, and all you used to care for?" she asked stormily.

"I suppose," gasped Giovanna. "Let me go to bed—indeed, I suffer."

But the Contessa did not remove her arms, and the two women in their festival splendour remained together in the gorgeous ornate room with the dawn light slipping between the opened shutter, and glancing over them soft as a caress.

"You are mine," said Vittoria in her heart, "mine, and this foreigner shall not take you away from me."

Giovanna writhed to be free, and moaned.

"I suffer," she repeated. "My head hurts and my heart. I want to be alone in the dark—"

"In a few days you will have forgotten this—these fancies are soon over," said the Contessa, slowly releasing her.

The girl replied by a wild look; she was burning and shaking with fever, the disordered hair on her brow was damp, and her cheeks were utterly pallid.

She turned away, walking heavily and with an air of infinite weariness. Her mother made no attempt to follow; her plans were already formed, nor had she any fear that she, Vittoria Odaleschi, bound by no convention, stayed by no scruple, great in art, resource, and charm, would be unable to cope with this mad affair. The foreigner, whom she scorned and hated, she did not trust; she did not believe that the heretic was actuated by her own horror of another creed, another race, nor did her long experience of men teach her that one of them was likely to forgo the chance of a beautiful, seductive woman and a large fortune—for the Contessa knew that it must appear to every stranger as if the Odaleschi, however ambiguous their position must be, were rich as well as noble.

Therefore she did not believe that Francis Moutray was leaving Bologna; yet she had a trust—strange in a character so false and unscrupulous—in her daughter's sincerity. She was sure Giovanna had truly resolved to see no more of an impossible lover; it was round the lover himself that all her suspicions and fears centred, and it was with him that she was prepared to deal.

Giovanna was untouched by her mother's intentions, more through carelessness than lack of insight. If she had considered the matter at all, she would have seen that the Contessa would take powerful and daring measures to prevent any frustration of her schemes or any affront to her pride; but she was too utterly occupied with her own wild emotion to consider what anyone else might do. She had, in a moment, won him and lost him—lost him—and yet it seemed to her incredible that he was really riding away.

She went up to her great dusky bedroom where the heavy curtains shut out the light, impatiently took off her jewels, her cloak, and cast herself on the bed-step with her face hidden in the velvet coverlet.

A complete lassitude crept over her; she was incapable of action, of thought. One idea only beat in her startled brain: that she belonged to this stranger and he to her, and that they were separated by that God whom she had always held in the deepest awe.

In all her short, careless life no counter influence to that of the lax but mighty Church that governed her world had ever disturbed Giovanna. She was, like her mother, deeply and unthinkingly religious; she had never rebelled against the yoke of Rome, principally because she had never felt its weight; there was no pleasure, no licence, no sin, ever likely to tempt her that the Church would not easily condone. She had heard a Cardinal answer, to one who remarked that Bologna was becoming too lawless—no fewer than two thousand deaths from murder and duels having resulted in one year—"What will you? It is human nature." She knew that priests were among her mother's guests, often the gayest at the festas, and she was under no delusion as to the exceedingly worldly part they played in political and domestic intrigue, but she knew that these people were safe and saved, and that a heretic was damned and lost.

So her mind told her, repeating the lesson impressed on it during her whole youth; but her heart contradicted fiercely, declaring heaven and hell to be shadows compared with the needs of earth, telling her that nothing mattered but human love, and suffering and compassion and yearning.

This struggle between a life-long belief, convention and conviction, and an emotion more powerful than any she had believed it possible to experience, left her bewildered and exhausted. She saw herself opposed to the Church on the one point on which the Church was adamant, and yet she could not believe that what she desired was sin; indeed, she was more passionately desirous of being virtuous than she had ever been. All frivolous, empty ideas had fallen from her; she wanted to be good, she wanted to serve this man, to make him happy, to school herself in his service; she wished to dedicate to him her beauty (which she rated very humbly now), her gifts, all her life; to leave her country, her luxury, her idleness, for his sake, she counted as nothing; she was eager to put her whole life beneath his feet—but it was God he asked her to give up, and before that she shrank in an abasement of horror.

The idea of moving him never occurred to her; she knew by instinct that her spirit could not cope with his, and whatever she might do for love of him, he would not move from his path for love of her. If he took her it would be on his own terms—"Will you give up your God for me?"

The memory of these words of his was like a sword in her heart, an actual pain burning and tearing.

He would leave her, and the loss would be complete and utter. She knew nothing of him, of the country or the people he came from, but she knew there was some woman somewhere whom he would one day kiss as he had kissed her in the garden of the Palazzo Rossi.

He had said that he would forswear love for her, but she did not credit that; such renunciation was not in her nature to comprehend.

She was herself so keen and sweet, so bright and ardent, so full of the capacity for love, devotion, and pleasure, so utterly without spiritual ideals—unless obedience to the Church could be called one—so direct and sincere in her desire and capacity for material success and happiness, that renunciation, repression, denial of human emotion was for her inconceivable; had she discovered it at all she would have found it arid and hideous.

Therefore the fiercest jealousy possessed her of the unknown woman, who must some day win the man who was for all time now the supreme passion of her soul. She loosened her hair and tore the ends of it, she pressed her bosom against the coverlet; she did not feel the hard wood of the step against her knees nor her cramped attitude. Her mind rushed ahead down the dank cavern of the future; for her she saw loveless blackness, and for him love for another; and so strong in her was the sheer human instinct and passion, that, ignorant and timid as she was, she rose to the height of the awful audacity of defying God. Even as the shrinking sheep will turn at bay to defend its lamb and make a show of fight to the attacking eagle, so Giovanna Odaleschi was wrought up to defy even God for the sake of her love.

She clutched at the crucifix, given her at the convent, that she always wore inside her gown, to steady herself against this awful blasphemy; she put her lips to it, but it was not the silver Christ she felt, but the fierce pressure of other soft human lips on her own.

"The devil has hold of me!" she moaned. She got to her feet, weak and miserable; she wondered what he was doing now, if he was really leaving Bologna ...not before the sun was up ...surely not before the sun was up.

She stumbled across the dark room and pulled aside the curtains; above the garden and the towers the serene blue of the early sky glowed, and a pale, lovely pink light fell on the buildings and the dark, straight trees that rose between them.

"Supposing he was already gone," thought Giovanna.

She turned from the windows to the mirror and saw herself there, red-eyed, hollow-cheeked, dishevelled.

"I am not beautiful enough, he cannot love me," she said in her heart, and a greater despair fell over her spirit; she felt rejected by God and man, useless and humbled, beyond expression unhappy.

She thought it a cruelty that this had happened—she longed to be as she had been two days ago—only two days!

"Oh Madonna!" she prayed, "I only want this one thing in all the world, and that is the thing you must deny me!"

The sun strengthened, joyously scattering the darkness in the heavy, gorgeous chamber, rendering brighter the reflections of her own wan face in the mirror.

"Am I never to be happy any more?" she asked herself. The crucifix dangled on her breast above the pink cameo, she stared dully before her, seeing nothing of the gay sunshine—nothing save the intolerable empty future when Francis Moutray would have left Bologna and her own wretched life.