Читать книгу Collected Works of Edith Wharton (31 books in one volume) - Edith Wharton - Страница 17

Ventnor. I congratulate you. (A pause.)

Mrs. Dale (moving to her seat behind the tea-table). I’ve never offered you any tea. (She bends over the kettle.) Why don’t you take your letters?

Ventnor. Because you’ve been clever enough to make it impossible for me. (He picks up the key and hands it to her. Then abruptly)—Was it all acting—just now?

Mrs. Dale. By what right do you ask?

Ventnor. By right of renouncing my claim to my letters. Keep them—and tell me.

Mrs. Dale. I give you back your claim—and I refuse to tell you.

Ventnor (sadly). Ah, Helen, if you deceived me, you deceived yourself also.

Mrs. Dale. What does it matter, now that we’re both undeceived? I played a losing game, that’s all.

Ventnor. Why losing—since all the letters are yours?

Mrs. Dale. The letters? (Slowly.) I’d forgotten the letters—

Ventnor (exultant). Ah, I knew you’d end by telling me the truth!

Mrs. Dale. The truth? Where is the truth? (Half to herself.) I thought I was lying when I began—but the lies turned into truth as I uttered them! (She looks at Ventnor.) I did want your letters for my memoirs—I did think I’d kept them for that purpose—and I wanted to get mine back for the same reason—but now (she puts out her hand and picks up some of her letters, which are lying scattered on the table near her)—how fresh they seem, and how they take me back to the time when we lived instead of writing about life!

Ventnor (smiling). The time when we didn’t prepare our impromptu effects beforehand and copyright our remarks about the weather!

Mrs. Dale. Or keep our epigrams in cold storage and our adjectives under lock and key!

Ventnor. When our emotions weren’t worth ten cents a word, and a signature wasn’t an autograph. Ah, Helen, after all, there’s nothing like the exhilaration of spending one’s capital!

Mrs. Dale. Of wasting it, you mean. (She points to the letters.) Do you suppose we could have written a word of these if we’d known we were putting our dreams out at interest? (She sits musing, with her eyes on the fire, and he watches her in silence.) Paul, do you remember the deserted garden we sometimes used to walk in?

Ventnor. The old garden with the high wall at the end of the village street? The garden with the ruined box-borders and the broken-down arbor? Why, I remember every weed in the paths and every patch of moss on the walls!

Mrs. Dale. Well—I went back there the other day. The village is immensely improved. There’s a new hotel with gas-fires, and a trolley in the main street; and the garden has been turned into a public park, where excursionists sit on cast-iron benches admiring the statue of an Abolitionist.

Ventnor. An Abolitionist—how appropriate!

Mrs. Dale. And the man who sold the garden has made a fortune that he doesn’t know how to spend—

Ventnor (rising impulsively). Helen, (he approaches and lays his hand on her letters), let’s sacrifice our fortune and keep the excursionists out!

Mrs. Dale (with a responsive movement). Paul, do you really mean it?

Ventnor (gayly). Mean it? Why, I feel like a landed proprietor already! It’s more than a garden—it’s a park.

Mrs. Dale. It’s more than a park, it’s a world—as long as we keep it to ourselves!

Ventnor. Ah, yes—even the pyramids look small when one sees a Cook’s tourist on top of them! (He takes the key from the table, unlocks the cabinet and brings out his letters, which he lays beside hers.) Shall we burn the key to our garden?

Mrs. Dale. Ah, then it will indeed be boundless! (Watching him while he throws the letters into the fire.)

Ventnor (turning back to her with a half-sad smile). But not too big for us to find each other in?

Mrs. Dale. Since we shall be the only people there! (He takes both her hands and they look at each other a moment in silence. Then he goes out by the door to the right. As he reaches the door she takes a step toward him, impulsively; then turning back she leans against the chimney-piece, quietly watching the letters burn.)

THE REMBRANDT

“You’re so artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty cousin’s importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in Eleanor’s line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets: the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one’s own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor, that none of the ready-made virtues ever had fitted her: they all pinched somewhere, and she’d given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, “You’re so artistic.” emphasizing the conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely stipulated, “It’s not old Saxe again?”

She shook her head reassuringly. “A picture—a Rembrandt!”

“Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?”

“Well”—she smiled—“that, of course, depends on you.”

“On me?”

“On your attribution. I dare say Mrs. Fontage would consent to the change—though she’s very conservative.”

A gleam of hope came to me and I pronounced: “One can’t judge of a picture in this weather.”

“Of course not. I’m coming for you tomorrow.”

“I’ve an engagement tomorrow.”

“I’ll come before or after your engagement.”

The afternoon paper lay at my elbow and I contrived a furtive consultation of the weather-report. It said “Rain tomorrow,” and I answered briskly: “All right, then; come at ten”—rapidly calculating that the clouds on which I counted might lift by noon.

My ingenuity failed of its due reward; for the heavens, as if in league with my cousin, emptied themselves before morning, and punctually at ten Eleanor and the sun appeared together in my office.

I hardly listened, as we descended the Museum steps and got into Eleanor’s hansom, to her vivid summing-up of the case. I guessed beforehand that the lady we were about to visit had lapsed by the most distressful degrees from opulence to a “hall-bedroom”; that her grandfather, if he had not been Minister to France, had signed the Declaration of Independence; that the Rembrandt was an heirloom, sole remnant of disbanded treasures; that for years its possessor had been unwilling to part with it, and that even now the question of its disposal must be approached with the most diplomatic obliquity.

Previous experience had taught me that all Eleanor’s “cases” presented a harrowing similarity of detail. No circumstance tending to excite the spectator’s sympathy and involve his action was omitted from the history of her beneficiaries; the lights and shades were indeed so skilfully adjusted that any impartial expression of opinion took on the hue of cruelty. I could have produced closetfuls of “heirlooms” in attestation of this fact; for it is one more mark of Eleanor’s competence that her friends usually pay the interest on her philanthropy. My one hope was that in this case the object, being a picture, might reasonably be rated beyond my means; and as our cab drew up before a blistered brownstone doorstep I formed the self-defensive resolve to place an extreme valuation on Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. It is Eleanor’s fault if she is sometimes fought with her own weapons.

The house stood in one of those shabby provisional-looking New York streets that seem resignedly awaiting demolition. It was the kind of house that, in its high days, must have had a bow-window with a bronze in it. The bow-window had been replaced by a plumber’s devanture, and one might conceive the bronze to have gravitated to the limbo where Mexican onyx tables and bric-a-brac in buffalo-horn await the first signs of our next aesthetic reaction.

Eleanor swept me through a hall that smelled of poverty, up unlit stairs to a bare slit of a room. “And she must leave this in a month!” she whispered across her knock.

I had prepared myself for the limp widow’s weed of a woman that one figures in such a setting; and confronted abruptly with Mrs. Fontage’s white-haired erectness I had the disconcerting sense that I was somehow in her presence at my own solicitation. I instinctively charged Eleanor with this reversal of the situation; but a moment later I saw it must be ascribed to a something about Mrs. Fontage that precluded the possibility of her asking any one a favor. It was not that she was of forbidding, or even majestic, demeanor; but that one guessed, under her aquiline prettiness, a dignity nervously on guard against the petty betrayal of her surroundings. The room was unconcealably poor: the little faded “relics,” the high-stocked ancestral silhouettes, the steel-engravings after Raphael and Correggio, grouped in a vain attempt to hide the most obvious stains on the wallpaper, served only to accentuate the contrast of a past evidently diversified by foreign travel and the enjoyment of the arts. Even Mrs. Fontage’s dress had the air of being a last expedient, the ultimate outcome of a much-taxed ingenuity in darning and turning. One felt that all the poor lady’s barriers were falling save that of her impregnable manner.

To this manner I found myself conveying my appreciation of being admitted to a view of the Rembrandt.

Mrs. Fontage’s smile took my homage for granted. “It is always,” she conceded, “a privilege to be in the presence of the great masters.” Her slim wrinkled hand waved me to a dusky canvas near the window.

“It’s so interesting, dear Mrs. Fontage,” I heard Eleanor exclaiming, “and my cousin will be able to tell you exactly—” Eleanor, in my presence, always admits that she knows nothing about art; but she gives the impression that this is merely because she hasn’t had time to look into the matter—and has had me to do it for her.

Mrs. Fontage seated herself without speaking, as though fearful that a breath might disturb my communion with the masterpiece. I felt that she thought Eleanor’s reassuring ejaculations ill-timed; and in this I was of one mind with her; for the impossibility of telling her exactly what I thought of her Rembrandt had become clear to me at a glance.

My cousin’s vivacities began to languish and the silence seemed to shape itself into a receptacle for my verdict. I stepped back, affecting a more distant scrutiny; and as I did so my eye caught Mrs. Fontage’s profile. Her lids trembled slightly. I took refuge in the familiar expedient of asking the history of the picture, and she waved me brightly to a seat.

This was indeed a topic on which she could dilate. The Rembrandt, it appeared, had come into Mr. Fontage’s possession many years ago, while the young couple were on their wedding-tour, and under circumstances so romantic that she made no excuse for relating them in all their parenthetic fulness. The picture belonged to an old Belgian Countess of redundant quarterings, whom the extravagances of an ungovernable nephew had compelled to part with her possessions (in the most private manner) about the time of the Fontages’ arrival. By a really remarkable coincidence, it happened that their courier (an exceptionally intelligent and superior man) was an old servant of the Countess’s, and had thus been able to put them in the way of securing the Rembrandt under the very nose of an English Duke, whose agent had been sent to Brussels to negotiate for its purchase. Mrs. Fontage could not recall the Duke’s name, but he was a great collector and had a famous Highland castle, where somebody had been murdered, and which she herself had visited (by moonlight) when she had travelled in Scotland as a girl. The episode had in short been one of the most interesting “experiences” of a tour almost chromo-lithographic in vivacity of impression; and they had always meant to go back to Brussels for the sake of reliving so picturesque a moment. Circumstances (of which the narrator’s surroundings declared the nature) had persistently interfered with the projected return to Europe, and the picture had grown doubly valuable as representing the high-water mark of their artistic emotions. Mrs. Fontage’s moist eye caressed the canvas. “There is only,” she added with a perceptible effort, “one slight drawback: the picture is not signed. But for that the Countess, of course, would have sold it to a museum. All the connoisseurs who have seen it pronounce it an undoubted Rembrandt, in the artist’s best manner; but the museums”—she arched her brows in smiling recognition of a well-known weakness—“give the preference to signed examples—”

Mrs. Fontage’s words evoked so touching a vision of the young tourists of fifty years ago, entrusting to an accomplished and versatile courier the direction of their helpless zeal for art, that I lost sight for a moment of the point at issue. The old Belgian Countess, the wealthy Duke with a feudal castle in Scotland, Mrs. Fontage’s own maiden pilgrimage to Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood, all the accessories of the naïf transaction, seemed a part of that vanished Europe to which our young race carried its indiscriminate ardors, its tender romantic credulity: the legendary castellated Europe of keepsakes, brigands and old masters, that compensated, by one such “experience” as Mrs. Fontage’s, for an after-life of aesthetic privation.

I was restored to the present by Eleanor’s looking at her watch. The action mutely conveyed that something was expected of me. I risked the temporizing statement that the picture was very interesting; but Mrs. Fontage’s polite assent revealed the poverty of the expedient. Eleanor’s impatience overflowed.

“You would like my cousin to give you an idea of its value?” she suggested.

Mrs. Fontage grew more erect. “No one,” she corrected with great gentleness, “can know its value quite as well as I, who live with it—”

We murmured our hasty concurrence.

“But it might be interesting to hear”—she addressed herself to me—“as a mere matter of curiosity—what estimate would be put on it from the purely commercial point of view—if such a term may be used in speaking of a work of art.”

I sounded a note of deprecation.

“Oh, I understand, of course,” she delicately anticipated me, “that that could never be your view, your personal view; but since occasions may arise—do arise—when it becomes necessary to—to put a price on the priceless, as it were—I have thought—Miss Copt has suggested—”

“Some day,” Eleanor encouraged her, “you might feel that the picture ought to belong to some one who has more—more opportunity of showing it—letting it be seen by the public—for educational reasons—”

“I have tried,” Mrs. Fontage admitted, “to see it in that light.”

The crucial moment was upon me. To escape the challenge of Mrs. Fontage’s brilliant composure I turned once more to the picture. If my courage needed reinforcement, the picture amply furnished it. Looking at that lamentable canvas seemed the surest way of gathering strength to denounce it; but behind me, all the while, I felt Mrs. Fontage’s shuddering pride drawn up in a final effort of self-defense. I hated myself for my sentimental perversion of the situation. Reason argued that it was more cruel to deceive Mrs. Fontage than to tell her the truth; but that merely proved the inferiority of reason to instinct in situations involving any concession to the emotions. Along with her faith in the Rembrandt I must destroy not only the whole fabric of Mrs. Fontage’s past, but even that lifelong habit of acquiescence in untested formulas that makes the best part of the average feminine strength. I guessed the episode of the picture to be inextricably interwoven with the traditions and convictions which served to veil Mrs. Fontage’s destitution not only from others but from herself. Viewed in that light the Rembrandt had perhaps been worth its purchase-money; and I regretted that works of art do not commonly sell on the merit of the moral support they may have rendered.

From this unavailing flight I was recalled by the sense that something must be done. To place a fictitious value on the picture was at best a provisional measure; while the brutal alternative of advising Mrs. Fontage to sell it for a hundred dollars at least afforded an opening to the charitably disposed purchaser. I intended, if other resources failed, to put myself forward in that light; but delicacy of course forbade my coupling my unflattering estimate of the Rembrandt with an immediate offer to buy it. All I could do was to inflict the wound: the healing unguent must be withheld for later application.

I turned to Mrs. Fontage, who sat motionless, her finely-lined cheeks touched with an expectant color, her eyes averted from the picture which was so evidently the one object they beheld.

“My dear madam—” I began. Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me. It shrouded every alternative in darkness and I had the flurried sense of having lost my way among the intricacies of my contention. Of a sudden I felt the hopelessness of finding a crack in her impenetrable conviction. My words slipped from me like broken weapons. “The picture,” I faltered, “would of course be worth more if it were signed. As it is, I—I hardly think—on a conservative estimate—it can be valued at—at more—than—a thousand dollars, say—”

My deflected argument ran on somewhat aimlessly till it found itself plunging full tilt against the barrier of Mrs. Fontage’s silence. She sat as impassive as though I had not spoken. Eleanor loosed a few fluttering words of congratulation and encouragement, but their flight was suddenly cut short. Mrs. Fontage had risen with a certain solemnity.

“I could never,” she said gently—her gentleness was adamantine—“under any circumstances whatever, consider, for a moment even, the possibility of parting with the picture at such a price.”

II

Within three weeks a tremulous note from Mrs. Fontage requested the favor of another visit. If the writing was tremulous, however, the writer’s tone was firm. She named her own day and hour, without the conventional reference to her visitor’s convenience.

My first impulse was to turn the note over to Eleanor. I had acquitted myself of my share in the ungrateful business of coming to Mrs. Fontage’s aid, and if, as her letter denoted, she had now yielded to the closer pressure of need, the business of finding a purchaser for the Rembrandt might well be left to my cousin’s ingenuity. But here conscience put in the uncomfortable reminder that it was I who, in putting a price on the picture, had raised the real obstacle in the way of Mrs. Fontage’s rescue. No one would give a thousand dollars for the Rembrandt; but to tell Mrs. Fontage so had become as unthinkable as murder. I had, in fact, on returning from my first inspection of the picture, refrained from imparting to Eleanor my opinion of its value. Eleanor is porous, and I knew that sooner or later the unnecessary truth would exude through the loose texture of her dissimulation. Not infrequently she thus creates the misery she alleviates; and I have sometimes suspected her of paining people in order that she might be sorry for them. I had, at all events, cut off retreat in Eleanor’s direction; and the remaining alternative carried me straight to Mrs. Fontage.

She received me with the same commanding sweetness. The room was even barer than before—I believe the carpet was gone—but her manner built up about her a palace to which I was welcomed with high state; and it was as a mere incident of the ceremony that I was presently made aware of her decision to sell the Rembrandt. My previous unsuccess in planning how to deal with Mrs. Fontage had warned me to leave my farther course to chance; and I listened to her explanation with complete detachment. She had resolved to travel for her health; her doctor advised it, and as her absence might be indefinitely prolonged she had reluctantly decided to part with the picture in order to avoid the expense of storage and insurance. Her voice drooped at the admission, and she hurried on, detailing the vague itinerary of a journey that was to combine long-promised visits to impatient friends with various “interesting opportunities” less definitely specified. The poor lady’s skill in rearing a screen of verbiage about her enforced avowal had distracted me from my own share in the situation, and it was with dismay that I suddenly caught the drift of her assumptions. She expected me to buy the Rembrandt for the Museum; she had taken my previous valuation as a tentative bid, and when I came to my senses she was in the act of accepting my offer.

Had I had a thousand dollars of my own to dispose of, the bargain would have been concluded on the spot; but I was in the impossible position of being materially unable to buy the picture and morally unable to tell her that it was not worth acquiring for the Museum.

I dashed into the first evasion in sight. I had no authority, I explained, to purchase pictures for the Museum without the consent of the committee.

Mrs. Fontage coped for a moment in silence with the incredible fact that I had rejected her offer; then she ventured, with a kind of pale precipitation: “But I understood—Miss Copt tells me that you practically decide such matters for the committee.” I could guess what the effort had cost her.

“My cousin is given to generalizations. My opinion may have some weight with the committee—”

“Well, then—” she timidly prompted.

“For that very reason I can’t buy the picture.”

She said, with a drooping note, “I don’t understand.”

“Yet you told me,” I reminded her, “that you knew museums didn’t buy unsigned pictures.”

“Not for what they are worth! Every one knows that. But I—I understood—the price you named—” Her pride shuddered back from the abasement. “It’s a misunderstanding then,” she faltered.

To avoid looking at her, I glanced desperately at the Rembrandt. Could I—? But reason rejected the possibility. Even if the committee had been blind—and they all were but Crozier—I simply shouldn’t have dared to do it. I stood up, feeling that to cut the matter short was the only alleviation within reach.

Mrs. Fontage had summoned her indomitable smile; but its brilliancy dropped, as I opened the door, like a candle blown out by a draught.

“If there’s any one else—if you knew any one who would care to see the picture, I should be most happy—” She kept her eyes on me, and I saw that, in her case, it hurt less than to look at the Rembrandt. “I shall have to leave here, you know,” she panted, “if nobody cares to have it—”

III

That evening at my club I had just succeeded in losing sight of Mrs. Fontage in the fumes of an excellent cigar, when a voice at my elbow evoked her harassing image.

“I want to talk to you,” the speaker said, “about Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt.”

“There isn’t any,” I was about to growl; but looking up I recognized the confiding countenance of Mr. Jefferson Rose.

Mr. Rose was known to me chiefly as a young man suffused with a vague enthusiasm for Virtue and my cousin Eleanor.

One glance at his glossy exterior conveyed the assurance that his morals were as immaculate as his complexion and his linen. Goodness exuded from his moist eye, his liquid voice, the warm damp pressure of his trustful hand. He had always struck me as one of the most uncomplicated organisms I had ever met. His ideas were as simple and inconsecutive as the propositions in a primer, and he spoke slowly, with a kind of uniformity of emphasis that made his words stand out like the raised type for the blind. An obvious incapacity for abstract conceptions made him peculiarly susceptible to the magic of generalization, and one felt he would have been at the mercy of any Cause that spelled itself with a capital letter. It was hard to explain how, with such a superabundance of merit, he managed to be a good fellow: I can only say that he performed the astonishing feat as naturally as he supported an invalid mother and two sisters on the slender salary of a banker’s clerk. He sat down beside me with an air of bright expectancy.

“It’s a remarkable picture, isn’t it?” he said.

“You’ve seen it?”

“I’ve been so fortunate. Miss Copt was kind enough to get Mrs. Fontage’s permission; we went this afternoon.” I inwardly wished that Eleanor had selected another victim; unless indeed the visit were part of a plan whereby some third person, better equipped for the cultivation of delusions, was to be made to think the Rembrandt remarkable. Knowing the limitations of Mr. Rose’s resources I began to wonder if he had any rich aunts.

“And her buying it in that way, too,” he went on with his limpid smile, “from that old Countess in Brussels, makes it all the more interesting, doesn’t it? Miss Copt tells me it’s very seldom old pictures can be traced back for more than a generation. I suppose the fact of Mrs. Fontage’s knowing its history must add a good deal to its value?”

Uncertain as to his drift, I said: “In her eyes it certainly appears to.”

Implications are lost on Mr. Rose, who glowingly continued: “That’s the reason why I wanted to talk to you about it—to consult you. Miss Copt tells me you value it at a thousand dollars.”

There was no denying this, and I grunted a reluctant assent.

“Of course,” he went on earnestly, “your valuation is based on the fact that the picture isn’t signed—Mrs. Fontage explained that; and it does make a difference, certainly. But the thing is—if the picture’s really good—ought one to take advantage—? I mean—one can see that Mrs. Fontage is in a tight place, and I wouldn’t for the world—”

My astonished stare arrested him.

“You wouldn’t—?”

“I mean—you see, it’s just this way”; he coughed and blushed: “I can’t give more than a thousand dollars myself—it’s as big a sum as I can manage to scrape together—but before I make the offer I want to be sure I’m not standing in the way of her getting more money.”

My astonishment lapsed to dismay. “You’re going to buy the picture for a thousand dollars?”

His blush deepened. “Why, yes. It sounds rather absurd, I suppose. It isn’t much in my line, of course. I can see the picture’s very beautiful, but I’m no judge—it isn’t the kind of thing, naturally, that I could afford to go in for; but in this case I’m very glad to do what I can; the circumstances are so distressing; and knowing what you think of the picture I feel it’s a pretty safe investment—”

“I don’t think!” I blurted out.

“You—?”

“I don’t think the picture’s worth a thousand dollars; I don’t think it’s worth ten cents; I simply lied about it, that’s all.”

Mr. Rose looked as frightened as though I had charged him with the offense.

“Hang it, man, can’t you see how it happened? I saw the poor woman’s pride and happiness hung on her faith in that picture. I tried to make her understand that it was worthless—but she wouldn’t; I tried to tell her so—but I couldn’t. I behaved like a maudlin ass, but you shan’t pay for my infernal bungling—you mustn’t buy the picture!”

Mr. Rose sat silent, tapping one glossy boot-tip with another. Suddenly he turned on me a glance of stored intelligence. “But you know,” he said good-humoredly, “I rather think I must.”

“You haven’t—already?”

“Oh, no; the offer’s not made.”

“Well, then—”

His look gathered a brighter significance.

“But if the picture’s worth nothing, nobody will buy it—”

I groaned.

“Except,” he continued, “some fellow like me, who doesn’t know anything. I think it’s lovely, you know; I mean to hang it in my mother’s sitting-room.” He rose and clasped my hand in his adhesive pressure. “I’m awfully obliged to you for telling me this; but perhaps you won’t mind my asking you not to mention our talk to Miss Copt? It might bother her, you know, to think the picture isn’t exactly up to the mark; and it won’t make a rap of difference to me.”

IV

Mr. Rose left me to a sleepless night. The next morning my resolve was formed, and it carried me straight to Mrs. Fontage’s. She answered my knock by stepping out on the landing, and as she shut the door behind her I caught a glimpse of her devastated interior. She mentioned, with a careful avoidance of the note of pathos on which our last conversation had closed, that she was preparing to leave that afternoon; and the trunks obstructing the threshold showed that her preparations were nearly complete. They were, I felt certain, the same trunks that, strapped behind a rattling vettura, had accompanied the bride and groom on that memorable voyage of discovery of which the booty had till recently adorned her walls; and there was a dim consolation in the thought that those early “finds” in coral and Swiss wood-carving, in lava and alabaster, still lay behind the worn locks, in the security of worthlessness.

Mrs. Fontage, on the landing, among her strapped and corded treasures, maintained the same air of stability that made it impossible, even under such conditions, to regard her flight as anything less dignified than a departure. It was the moral support of what she tacitly assumed that enabled me to set forth with proper deliberation the object of my visit; and she received my announcement with an absence of surprise that struck me as the very flower of tact. Under cover of these mutual assumptions the transaction was rapidly concluded; and it was not till the canvas passed into my hands that, as though the physical contact had unnerved her, Mrs. Fontage suddenly faltered. “It’s the giving it up—” she stammered, disguising herself to the last; and I hastened away from the collapse of her splendid effrontery.

I need hardly point out that I had acted impulsively, and that reaction from the most honorable impulses is sometimes attended by moral perturbation. My motives had indeed been mixed enough to justify some uneasiness, but this was allayed by the instinctive feeling that it is more venial to defraud an institution than a man. Since Mrs. Fontage had to be kept from starving by means not wholly defensible, it was better that the obligation should be borne by a rich institution than an impecunious youth. I doubt, in fact, if my scruples would have survived a night’s sleep, had they not been complicated by some uncertainty as to my own future. It was true that, subject to the purely formal assent of the committee, I had full power to buy for the Museum, and that the one member of the committee likely to dispute my decision was opportunely travelling in Europe; but the picture once in place I must face the risk of any expert criticism to which chance might expose it. I dismissed this contingency for future study, stored the Rembrandt in the cellar of the Museum, and thanked heaven that Crozier was abroad.

Six months later he strolled into my office. I had just concluded, under conditions of exceptional difficulty, and on terms unexpectedly benign, the purchase of the great Bartley Reynolds; and this circumstance, by relegating the matter of the Rembrandt to a lower stratum of consciousness, enabled me to welcome Crozier with unmixed pleasure. My security was enhanced by his appearance. His smile was charged with amiable reminiscences, and I inferred that his trip had put him in the humor to approve of everything, or at least to ignore what fell short of his approval. I had therefore no uneasiness in accepting his invitation to dine that evening. It is always pleasant to dine with Crozier and never more so than when he is just back from Europe. His conversation gives even the food a flavor of the Café Anglais.

The repast was delightful, and it was not till we had finished a Camembert which he must have brought over with him, that my host said, in a tone of after-dinner perfunctoriness: “I see you’ve picked up a picture or two since I left.”

I assented. “The Bartley Reynolds seemed too good an opportunity to miss, especially as the French government was after it. I think we got it cheap—”

“Connu, connu” said Crozier pleasantly. “I know all about the Reynolds. It was the biggest kind of a haul and I congratulate you. Best stroke of business we’ve done yet. But tell me about the other picture—the Rembrandt.”

“I never said it was a Rembrandt.” I could hardly have said why, but I felt distinctly annoyed with Crozier.

“Of course not. There’s ‘Rembrandt’ on the frame, but I saw you’d modified it to ‘Dutch School’; I apologize.” He paused, but I offered no explanation. “What about it?” he went on. “Where did you pick it up?” As he leaned to the flame of the cigar-lighter his face seemed ruddy with enjoyment.

“I got it for a song,” I said.

“A thousand, I think?”

“Have you seen it?” I asked abruptly.

“Went over the place this afternoon and found it in the cellar. Why hasn’t it been hung, by the way?”

I paused a moment. “I’m waiting—”

“To—?”

“To have it varnished.”

“Ah!” He leaned back and poured himself a second glass of Chartreuse. The smile he confided to its golden depths provoked me to challenge him with—

“What do you think of it?”

“The Rembrandt?” He lifted his eyes from the glass. “Just what you do.”

“It isn’t a Rembrandt.”

“I apologize again. You call it, I believe, a picture of the same period?”

“I’m uncertain of the period.”

“H’m.” He glanced appreciatively along his cigar. “What are you certain of?”

“That it’s a damned bad picture,” I said savagely.

He nodded. “Just so. That’s all we wanted to know.”

“We?”

“We—I—the committee, in short. You see, my dear fellow, if you hadn’t been certain it was a damned bad picture our position would have been a little awkward. As it is, my remaining duty—I ought to explain that in this matter I’m acting for the committee—is as simple as it’s agreeable.”

“I’ll be hanged,” I burst out, “if I understand one word you’re saying!”

He fixed me with a kind of cruel joyousness. “You will—you will,” he assured me; “at least you’ll begin to, when you hear that I’ve seen Miss Copt.”

“Miss Copt?”

“And that she has told me under what conditions the picture was bought.”

“She doesn’t know anything about the conditions! That is,” I added, hastening to restrict the assertion, “she doesn’t know my opinion of the picture.” I thirsted for five minutes with Eleanor.

“Are you quite sure?” Crozier took me up. “Mr. Jefferson Rose does.”

“Ah—I see.”

“I thought you would,” he reminded me. “As soon as I’d laid eyes on the Rembrandt—I beg your pardon!—I saw that it—well, required some explanation.”

“You might have come to me.”

“I meant to; but I happened to meet Miss Copt, whose encyclopædic information has often before been of service to me. I always go to Miss Copt when I want to look up anything; and I found she knew all about the Rembrandt.”

“All?”

“Precisely. The knowledge was in fact causing her sleepless nights. Mr. Rose, who was suffering from the same form of insomnia, had taken her into his confidence, and she—ultimately—took me into hers.”

“Of course!”

“I must ask you to do your cousin justice. She didn’t speak till it became evident to her uncommonly quick perceptions that your buying the picture on its merits would have been infinitely worse for—for everybody—than your diverting a small portion of the Museum’s funds to philanthropic uses. Then she told me the moving incident of Mr. Rose. Good fellow, Rose. And the old lady’s case was desperate. Somebody had to buy that picture.” I moved uneasily in my seat “Wait a moment, will you? I haven’t finished my cigar. There’s a little head of Il Fiammingo’s that you haven’t seen, by the way; I picked it up the other day in Parma. We’ll go in and have a look at it presently. But meanwhile what I want to say is that I’ve been charged—in the most informal way—to express to you the committee’s appreciation of your admirable promptness and energy in capturing the Bartley Reynolds. We shouldn’t have got it at all if you hadn’t been uncommonly wide-awake, and to get it at such a price is a double triumph. We’d have thought nothing of a few more thousands—”

“I don’t see,” I impatiently interposed, “that, as far as I’m concerned, that alters the case.”

“The case—?”

“Of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. I bought the picture because, as you say, the situation was desperate, and I couldn’t raise a thousand myself. What I did was of course indefensible; but the money shall be refunded tomorrow—”

Crozier raised a protesting hand. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking ex cathedra. The money’s been refunded already. The fact is, the Museum has sold the Rembrandt.”

I stared at him wildly. “Sold it? To whom?”

“Why—to the committee.—Hold on a bit, please.—Won’t you take another cigar? Then perhaps I can finish what I’ve got to say.—Why, my dear fellow, the committee’s under an obligation to you—that’s the way we look at it. I’ve investigated Mrs. Fontage’s case, and—well, the picture had to be bought. She’s eating meat now, I believe, for the first time in a year. And they’d have turned her out into the street that very day, your cousin tells me. Something had to be done at once, and you’ve simply given a number of well-to-do and self-indulgent gentlemen the opportunity of performing, at very small individual expense, a meritorious action in the nick of time. That’s the first thing I’ve got to thank you for. And then—you’ll remember, please, that I have the floor—that I’m still speaking for the committee—and secondly, as a slight recognition of your services in securing the Bartley Reynolds at a very much lower figure than we were prepared to pay, we beg you—the committee begs you—to accept the gift of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. Now we’ll go in and look at that little head….”

THE MOVING FINGER

The news of Mrs. Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder—one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as though all sorts of renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of that one wheel. Not that Mrs. Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum to the social machine: her unique distinction was that of filling to perfection her special place in the world. So many people are like badly-composed statues, overlapping their niches at one point and leaving them vacant at another. Mrs. Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life; and if it be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a very big gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility. Ralph Grancy’s was in short a kind of disembodied usefulness: one of those constructive influences that, instead of crystallizing into definite forms, remain as it were a medium for the development of clear thinking and fine feeling. He faithfully irrigated his own dusty patch of life, and the fruitful moisture stole far beyond his boundaries. If, to carry on the metaphor, Grancy’s life was a sedulously-cultivated enclosure, his wife was the flower he had planted in its midst—the embowering tree, rather, which gave him rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches.

We had all—his small but devoted band of followers—known a moment when it seemed likely that Grancy would fail us. We had watched him pitted against one stupid obstacle after another—ill-health, poverty, misunderstanding and, worst of all for a man of his texture, his first wife’s soft insidious egotism. We had seen him sinking under the leaden embrace of her affection like a swimmer in a drowning clutch; but just as we despaired he had always come to the surface again, blinded, panting, but striking out fiercely for the shore. When at last her death released him it became a question as to how much of the man she had carried with her. Left alone, he revealed numb withered patches, like a tree from which a parasite has been stripped. But gradually he began to put out new leaves; and when he met the lady who was to become his second wife—his one real wife, as his friends reckoned—the whole man burst into flower.

The second Mrs. Grancy was past thirty when he married her, and it was clear that she had harvested that crop of middle joy which is rooted in young despair. But if she had lost the surface of eighteen she had kept its inner light; if her cheek lacked the gloss of immaturity her eyes were young with the stored youth of half a lifetime. Grancy had first known her somewhere in the East—I believe she was the sister of one of our consuls out there—and when he brought her home to New York she came among us as a stranger. The idea of Grancy’s remarriage had been a shock to us all. After one such calcining most men would have kept out of the fire; but we agreed that he was predestined to sentimental blunders, and we awaited with resignation the embodiment of his latest mistake. Then Mrs. Grancy came—and we understood. She was the most beautiful and the most complete of explanations. We shuffled our defeated omniscience out of sight and gave it hasty burial under a prodigality of welcome. For the first time in years we had Grancy off our minds. “He’ll do something great now!” the least sanguine of us prophesied; and our sentimentalist emended: “He has done it—in marrying her!”

It was Claydon, the portrait-painter, who risked this hyperbole; and who soon afterward, at the happy husband’s request, prepared to defend it in a portrait of Mrs. Grancy. We were all—even Claydon—ready to concede that Mrs. Grancy’s unwontedness was in some degree a matter of environment. Her graces were complementary and it needed the mate’s call to reveal the flash of color beneath her neutral-tinted wings. But if she needed Grancy to interpret her, how much greater was the service she rendered him! Claydon professionally described her as the right frame for him; but if she defined she also enlarged, if she threw the whole into perspective she also cleared new ground, opened fresh vistas, reclaimed whole areas of activity that had run to waste under the harsh husbandry of privation. This interaction of sympathies was not without its visible expression. Claydon was not alone in maintaining that Grancy’s presence—or indeed the mere mention of his name—had a perceptible effect on his wife’s appearance. It was as though a light were shifted, a curtain drawn back, as though, to borrow another of Claydon’s metaphors, Love the indefatigable artist were perpetually seeking a happier “pose” for his model. In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women’s faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes. What Claydon read there—or at least such scattered hints of the ritual as reached him through the sanctuary doors—his portrait in due course declared to us. When the picture was exhibited it was at once acclaimed as his masterpiece; but the people who knew Mrs. Grancy smiled and said it was flattered. Claydon, however, had not set out to paint their Mrs. Grancy—or ours even—but Ralph’s; and Ralph knew his own at a glance. At the first confrontation he saw that Claydon had understood. As for Mrs. Grancy, when the finished picture was shown to her she turned to the painter and said simply: “Ah, you’ve done me facing the east!”

The picture, then, for all its value, seemed a mere incident in the unfolding of their double destiny, a foot-note to the illuminated text of their lives. It was not till afterward that it acquired the significance of last words spoken on a threshold never to be recrossed. Grancy, a year after his marriage, had given up his town house and carried his bliss an hour’s journey away, to a little place among the hills. His various duties and interests brought him frequently to New York but we necessarily saw him less often than when his house had served as the rallying-point of kindred enthusiasms. It seemed a pity that such an influence should be withdrawn, but we all felt that his long arrears of happiness should be paid in whatever coin he chose. The distance from which the fortunate couple radiated warmth on us was not too great for friendship to traverse; and our conception of a glorified leisure took the form of Sundays spent in the Grancys’ library, with its sedative rural outlook, and the portrait of Mrs. Grancy illuminating its studious walls. The picture was at its best in that setting; and we used to accuse Claydon of visiting Mrs. Grancy in order to see her portrait. He met this by declaring that the portrait was Mrs. Grancy; and there were moments when the statement seemed unanswerable. One of us, indeed—I think it must have been the novelist—said that Clayton had been saved from falling in love with Mrs. Grancy only by falling in love with his picture of her; and it was noticeable that he, to whom his finished work was no more than the shed husk of future effort, showed a perennial tenderness for this one achievement. We smiled afterward to think how often, when Mrs. Grancy was in the room, her presence reflecting itself in our talk like a gleam of sky in a hurrying current, Claydon, averted from the real woman, would sit as it were listening to the picture. His attitude, at the time, seemed only a part of the unusualness of those picturesque afternoons, when the most familiar combinations of life underwent a magical change. Some human happiness is a landlocked lake; but the Grancys’ was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and illimitable surface to the voyaging interests of life. There was room and to spare on those waters for all our separate ventures; and always beyond the sunset, a mirage of the fortunate isles toward which our prows bent.

II

It was in Rome that, three years later, I heard of her death. The notice said “suddenly”; I was glad of that. I was glad too—basely perhaps—to be away from Grancy at a time when silence must have seemed obtuse and speech derisive.

I was still in Rome when, a few months afterward, he suddenly arrived there. He had been appointed secretary of legation at Constantinople and was on the way to his post. He had taken the place, he said frankly, “to get away.” Our relations with the Porte held out a prospect of hard work, and that, he explained, was what he needed. He could never be satisfied to sit down among the ruins. I saw that, like most of us in moments of extreme moral tension, he was playing a part, behaving as he thought it became a man to behave in the eye of disaster. The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe. Grancy, by nature musing and retrospective, had chosen the rôle of the man of action, who answers blow for blow and opposes a mailed front to the thrusts of destiny; and the completeness of the equipment testified to his inner weakness. We talked only of what we were not thinking of, and parted, after a few days, with a sense of relief that proved the inadequacy of friendship to perform, in such cases, the office assigned to it by tradition.

Soon afterward my own work called me home, but Grancy remained several years in Europe. International diplomacy kept its promise of giving him work to do, and during the year in which he acted as _chargé d’affaires_ he acquitted himself, under trying conditions, with conspicuous zeal and discretion. A political redistribution of matter removed him from office just as he had proved his usefulness to the government; and the following summer I heard that he had come home and was down at his place in the country.

On my return to town I wrote him and his reply came by the next post. He answered as it were in his natural voice, urging me to spend the following Sunday with him, and suggesting that I should bring down any of the old set who could be persuaded to join me. I thought this a good sign, and yet—shall I own it?—I was vaguely disappointed. Perhaps we are apt to feel that our friends’ sorrows should be kept like those historic monuments from which the encroaching ivy is periodically removed.

That very evening at the club I ran across Claydon. I told him of Grancy’s invitation and proposed that we should go down together; but he pleaded an engagement. I was sorry, for I had always felt that he and I stood nearer Ralph than the others, and if the old Sundays were to be renewed I should have preferred that we two should spend the first alone with him. I said as much to Claydon and offered to fit my time to his; but he met this by a general refusal.

“I don’t want to go to Grancy’s,” he said bluntly. I waited a moment, but he appended no qualifying clause.

“You’ve seen him since he came back?” I finally ventured.

Claydon nodded.

“And is he so awfully bad?”

“Bad? No: he’s all right.”

“All right? How can he be, unless he’s changed beyond all recognition?”

“Oh, you’ll recognize him,” said Claydon, with a puzzling deflection of emphasis.

His ambiguity was beginning to exasperate me, and I felt myself shut out from some knowledge to which I had as good a right as he.

“You’ve been down there already, I suppose?”

“Yes; I’ve been down there.”

“And you’ve done with each other—the partnership is dissolved?”

“Done with each other? I wish to God we had!” He rose nervously and tossed aside the review from which my approach had diverted him. “Look here,” he said, standing before me, “Ralph’s the best fellow going and there’s nothing under heaven I wouldn’t do for him—short of going down there again.” And with that he walked out of the room.

Claydon was incalculable enough for me to read a dozen different meanings into his words; but none of my interpretations satisfied me. I determined, at any rate, to seek no farther for a companion; and the next Sunday I travelled down to Grancy’s alone. He met me at the station and I saw at once that he had changed since our last meeting. Then he had been in fighting array, but now if he and grief still housed together it was no longer as enemies. Physically the transformation was as marked but less reassuring. If the spirit triumphed the body showed its scars. At five-and-forty he was gray and stooping, with the tired gait of an old man. His serenity, however, was not the resignation of age. I saw that he did not mean to drop out of the game. Almost immediately he began to speak of our old interests; not with an effort, as at our former meeting, but simply and naturally, in the tone of a man whose life has flowed back into its normal channels. I remembered, with a touch of self-reproach, how I had distrusted his reconstructive powers; but my admiration for his reserved force was now tinged by the sense that, after all, such happiness as his ought to have been paid with his last coin. The feeling grew as we neared the house and I found how inextricably his wife was interwoven with my remembrance of the place: how the whole scene was but an extension of that vivid presence.

Within doors nothing was changed, and my hand would have dropped without surprise into her welcoming clasp. It was luncheon-time, and Grancy led me at once to the diningroom, where the walls, the furniture, the very plate and porcelain, seemed a mirror in which a moment since her face had been reflected. I wondered whether Grancy, under the recovered tranquillity of his smile, concealed the same sense of her nearness, saw perpetually between himself and the actual her bright unappeasable ghost. He spoke of her once or twice, in an easy incidental way, and her name seemed to hang in the air after he had uttered it, like a chord that continues to vibrate. If he felt her presence it was evidently as an enveloping medium, the moral atmosphere in which he breathed. I had never before known how completely the dead may survive.

After luncheon we went for a long walk through the autumnal fields and woods, and dusk was falling when we reentered the house. Grancy led the way to the library, where, at this hour, his wife had always welcomed us back to a bright fire and a cup of tea. The room faced the west, and held a clear light of its own after the rest of the house had grown dark. I remembered how young she had looked in this pale gold light, which irradiated her eyes and hair, or silhouetted her girlish outline as she passed before the windows. Of all the rooms the library was most peculiarly hers; and here I felt that her nearness might take visible shape. Then, all in a moment, as Grancy opened the door, the feeling vanished and a kind of resistance met me on the threshold. I looked about me. Was the room changed? Had some desecrating hand effaced the traces of her presence? No; here too the setting was undisturbed. My feet sank into the same deep-piled Daghestan; the bookshelves took the firelight on the same rows of rich subdued bindings; her armchair stood in its old place near the tea-table; and from the opposite wall her face confronted me.

Her face—but was it hers? I moved nearer and stood looking up at the portrait. Grancy’s glance had followed mine and I heard him move to my side.

“You see a change in it?” he said.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means—that five years have passed.”

“Over her?”

“Why not?—Look at me!” He pointed to his gray hair and furrowed temples. “What do you think kept her so young? It was happiness! But now—” he looked up at her with infinite tenderness. “I like her better so,” he said. “It’s what she would have wished.”

“Have wished?”

“That we should grow old together. Do you think she would have wanted to be left behind?”

I stood speechless, my gaze travelling from his worn grief-beaten features to the painted face above. It was not furrowed like his; but a veil of years seemed to have descended on it. The bright hair had lost its elasticity, the cheek its clearness, the brow its light: the whole woman had waned.

Grancy laid his hand on my arm. “You don’t like it?” he said sadly.

“Like it? I—I’ve lost her!” I burst out.

“And I’ve found her,” he answered.

“In that?” I cried with a reproachful gesture.

“Yes; in that.” He swung round on me almost defiantly. “The other had become a sham, a lie! This is the way she would have looked—does look, I mean. Claydon ought to know, oughtn’t he?”

I turned suddenly. “Did Claydon do this for you?”

Grancy nodded.

“Since your return?”

“Yes. I sent for him after I’d been back a week—.” He turned away and gave a thrust to the smouldering fire. I followed, glad to leave the picture behind me. Grancy threw himself into a chair near the hearth, so that the light fell on his sensitive variable face. He leaned his head back, shading his eyes with his hand, and began to speak.

III

“You fellows knew enough of my early history to A guess what my second marriage meant to me. I say guess, because no one could understand—really. I’ve always had a feminine streak in me, I suppose: the need of a pair of eyes that should see with me, of a pulse that should keep time with mine. Life is a big thing, of course; a magnificent spectacle; but I got so tired of looking at it alone! Still, it’s always good to live, and I had plenty of happiness—of the evolved kind. What I’d never had a taste of was the simple inconscient sort that one breathes in like the air….

“Well—I met her. It was like finding the climate in which I was meant to live. You know what she was—how indefinitely she multiplied one’s points of contact with life, how she lit up the caverns and bridged the abysses! Well, I swear to you (though I suppose the sense of all that was latent in me) that what I used to think of on my way home at the end of the day, was simply that when I opened this door she’d be sitting over there, with the lamplight falling in a particular way on one little curl in her neck…. When Claydon painted her he caught just the look she used to lift to mine when I came in—I’ve wondered, sometimes, at his knowing how she looked when she and I were alone.—How I rejoiced in that picture! I used to say to her, ‘You’re my prisoner now—I shall never lose you. If you grew tired of me and left me you’d leave your real self there on the wall!’ It was always one of our jokes that she was going to grow tired of me—

“Three years of it—and then she died. It was so sudden that there was no change, no diminution. It was as if she had suddenly become fixed, immovable, like her own portrait: as if Time had ceased at its happiest hour, just as Claydon had thrown down his brush one day and said, ‘I can’t do better than that.’

“I went away, as you know, and stayed over there five years. I worked as hard as I knew how, and after the first black months a little light stole in on me. From thinking that she would have been interested in what I was doing I came to feel that she was interested—that she was there and that she knew. I’m not talking any psychical jargon—I’m simply trying to express the sense I had that an influence so full, so abounding as hers couldn’t pass like a spring shower. We had so lived into each other’s hearts and minds that the consciousness of what she would have thought and felt illuminated all I did. At first she used to come back shyly, tentatively, as though not sure of finding me; then she stayed longer and longer, till at last she became again the very air I breathed…. There were bad moments, of course, when her nearness mocked me with the loss of the real woman; but gradually the distinction between the two was effaced and the mere thought of her grew warm as flesh and blood.

“Then I came home. I landed in the morning and came straight down here. The thought of seeing her portrait possessed me and my heart beat like a lover’s as I opened the library door. It was in the afternoon and the room was full of light. It fell on her picture—the picture of a young and radiant woman. She smiled at me coldly across the distance that divided us. I had the feeling that she didn’t even recognize me. And then I caught sight of myself in the mirror over there—a gray-haired broken man whom she had never known!

“For a week we two lived together—the strange woman and the strange man. I used to sit night after night and question her smiling face; but no answer ever came. What did she know of me, after all? We were irrevocably separated by the five years of life that lay between us. At times, as I sat here, I almost grew to hate her; for her presence had driven away my gentle ghost, the real wife who had wept, aged, struggled with me during those awful years…. It was the worst loneliness I’ve ever known. Then, gradually, I began to notice a look of sadness in the picture’s eyes; a look that seemed to say: ‘Don’t you see that I am lonely too?’ And all at once it came over me how she would have hated to be left behind! I remembered her comparing life to a heavy book that could not be read with ease unless two people held it together; and I thought how impatiently her hand would have turned the pages that divided us!—So the idea came to me: ‘It’s the picture that stands between us; the picture that is dead, and not my wife. To sit in this room is to keep watch beside a corpse.’ As this feeling grew on me the portrait became like a beautiful mausoleum in which she had been buried alive: I could hear her beating against the painted walls and crying to me faintly for help….

“One day I found I couldn’t stand it any longer and I sent for Claydon. He came down and I told him what I’d been through and what I wanted him to do. At first he refused point-blank to touch the picture. The next morning I went off for a long tramp, and when I came home I found him sitting here alone. He looked at me sharply for a moment and then he said: ‘I’ve changed my mind; I’ll do it.’ I arranged one of the north rooms as a studio and he shut himself up there for a day; then he sent for me. The picture stood there as you see it now—it was as though she’d met me on the threshold and taken me in her arms! I tried to thank him, to tell him what it meant to me, but he cut me short.

“‘There’s an up train at five, isn’t there?’ he asked. ‘I’m booked for a dinner tonight. I shall just have time to make a bolt for the station and you can send my traps after me.’ I haven’t seen him since.

“I can guess what it cost him to lay hands on his masterpiece; but, after all, to him it was only a picture lost, to me it was my wife regained!”

IV

After that, for ten years or more, I watched the strange spectacle of a life of hopeful and productive effort based on the structure of a dream. There could be no doubt to those who saw Grancy during this period that he drew his strength and courage from the sense of his wife’s mystic participation in his task. When I went back to see him a few months later I found the portrait had been removed from the library and placed in a small study upstairs, to which he had transferred his desk and a few books. He told me he always sat there when he was alone, keeping the library for his Sunday visitors. Those who missed the portrait of course made no comment on its absence, and the few who were in his secret respected it. Gradually all his old friends had gathered about him and our Sunday afternoons regained something of their former character; but Claydon never reappeared among us.

As I look back now I see that Grancy must have been failing from the time of his return home. His invincible spirit belied and disguised the signs of weakness that afterward asserted themselves in my remembrance of him. He seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of life to draw on, and more than one of us was a pensioner on his superfluity.

Nevertheless, when I came back one summer from my European holiday and heard that he had been at the point of death, I understood at once that we had believed him well only because he wished us to.

I hastened down to the country and found him midway in a slow convalescence. I felt then that he was lost to us and he read my thought at a glance.

“Ah,” he said, “I’m an old man now and no mistake. I suppose we shall have to go half-speed after this; but we shan’t need towing just yet!”

The plural pronoun struck me, and involuntarily I looked up at Mrs. Grancy’s portrait. Line by line I saw my fear reflected in it. It was the face of a woman who knows that her husband is dying. My heart stood still at the thought of what Claydon had done.

Grancy had followed my glance. “Yes, it’s changed her,” he said quietly. “For months, you know, it was touch and go with me—we had a long fight of it, and it was worse for her than for me.” After a pause he added: “Claydon has been very kind; he’s so busy nowadays that I seldom see him, but when I sent for him the other day he came down at once.”

I was silent and we spoke no more of Grancy’s illness; but when I took leave it seemed like shutting him in alone with his death-warrant.

The next time I went down to see him he looked much better. It was a Sunday and he received me in the library, so that I did not see the portrait again. He continued to improve and toward spring we began to feel that, as he had said, he might yet travel a long way without being towed.

One evening, on returning to town after a visit which had confirmed my sense of reassurance, I found Claydon dining alone at the club. He asked me to join him and over the coffee our talk turned to his work.

“If you’re not too busy,” I said at length, “you ought to make time to go down to Grancy’s again.”

He looked up quickly. “Why?” he asked.

“Because he’s quite well again,” I returned with a touch of cruelty. “His wife’s prognostications were mistaken.”

Claydon stared at me a moment. “Oh, she knows,” he affirmed with a smile that chilled me.

“You mean to leave the portrait as it is then?” I persisted.

He shrugged his shoulders. “He hasn’t sent for me yet!”

A waiter came up with the cigars and Claydon rose and joined another group.

It was just a fortnight later that Grancy’s housekeeper telegraphed for me. She met me at the station with the news that he had been “taken bad” and that the doctors were with him. I had to wait for some time in the deserted library before the medical men appeared. They had the baffled manner of empirics who have been superseded by the great Healer; and I lingered only long enough to hear that Grancy was not suffering and that my presence could do him no harm.

I found him seated in his armchair in the little study. He held out his hand with a smile.

“You see she was right after all,” he said.

“She?” I repeated, perplexed for the moment.

“My wife.” He indicated the picture. “Of course I knew she had no hope from the first. I saw that”—he lowered his voice—“after Claydon had been here. But I wouldn’t believe it at first!”

I caught his hands in mine. “For God’s sake don’t believe it now!” I adjured him.

He shook his head gently. “It’s too late,” he said. “I might have known that she knew.”

“But, Grancy, listen to me,” I began; and then I stopped. What could I say that would convince him? There was no common ground of argument on which we could meet; and after all it would be easier for him to die feeling that she had known. Strangely enough, I saw that Claydon had missed his mark….

V

Grancy’s will named me as one of his executors; and my associate, having other duties on his hands, begged me to assume the task of carrying out our friend’s wishes. This placed me under the necessity of informing Claydon that the portrait of Mrs. Grancy had been bequeathed to him; and he replied by the next post that he would send for the picture at once. I was staying in the deserted house when the portrait was taken away; and as the door closed on it I felt that Grancy’s presence had vanished too. Was it his turn to follow her now, and could one ghost haunt another?

After that, for a year or two, I heard nothing more of the picture, and though I met Claydon from time to time we had little to say to each other. I had no definable grievance against the man and I tried to remember that he had done a fine thing in sacrificing his best picture to a friend; but my resentment had all the tenacity of unreason.

One day, however, a lady whose portrait he had just finished begged me to go with her to see it. To refuse was impossible, and I went with the less reluctance that I knew I was not the only friend she had invited. The others were all grouped around the easel when I entered, and after contributing my share to the chorus of approval I turned away and began to stroll about the studio. Claydon was something of a collector and his things were generally worth looking at. The studio was a long tapestried room with a curtained archway at one end. The curtains were looped back, showing a smaller apartment, with books and flowers and a few fine bits of bronze and porcelain. The tea-table standing in this inner room proclaimed that it was open to inspection, and I wandered in. A _bleu poudré_ vase first attracted me; then I turned to examine a slender bronze Ganymede, and in so doing found myself face to face with Mrs. Grancy’s portrait. I stared up at her blankly and she smiled back at me in all the recovered radiance of youth. The artist had effaced every trace of his later touches and the original picture had reappeared. It throned alone on the panelled wall, asserting a brilliant supremacy over its carefully-chosen surroundings. I felt in an instant that the whole room was tributary to it: that Claydon had heaped his treasures at the feet of the woman he loved. Yes—it was the woman he had loved and not the picture; and my instinctive resentment was explained.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Ah, how could you?” I cried, turning on him.

“How could I?” he retorted. “How could I not? Doesn’t she belong to me now?”

I moved away impatiently.

“Wait a moment,” he said with a detaining gesture. “The others have gone and I want to say a word to you.—Oh, I know what you’ve thought of me—I can guess! You think I killed Grancy, I suppose?”

I was startled by his sudden vehemence. “I think you tried to do a cruel thing,” I said.

“Ah—what a little way you others see into life!” he murmured. “Sit down a moment—here, where we can look at her—and I’ll tell you.”

He threw himself on the ottoman beside me and sat gazing up at the picture, with his hands clasped about his knee.

“Pygmalion,” he began slowly, “turned his statue into a real woman; I turned my real woman into a picture. Small compensation, you think—but you don’t know how much of a woman belongs to you after you’ve painted her!—Well, I made the best of it, at any rate—I gave her the best I had in me; and she gave me in return what such a woman gives by merely being. And after all she rewarded me enough by making me paint as I shall never paint again! There was one side of her, though, that was mine alone, and that was her beauty; for no one else understood it. To Grancy even it was the mere expression of herself—what language is to thought. Even when he saw the picture he didn’t guess my secret—he was so sure she was all his! As though a man should think he owned the moon because it was reflected in the pool at his door—

“Well—when he came home and sent for me to change the picture it was like asking me to commit murder. He wanted me to make an old woman of her—of her who had been so divinely, unchangeably young! As if any man who really loved a woman would ask her to sacrifice her youth and beauty for his sake! At first I told him I couldn’t do it—but afterward, when he left me alone with the picture, something queer happened. I suppose it was because I was always so confoundedly fond of Grancy that it went against me to refuse what he asked. Anyhow, as I sat looking up at her, she seemed to say, ‘I’m not yours but his, and I want you to make me what he wishes.” And so I did it. I could have cut my hand off when the work was done—I daresay he told you I never would go back and look at it. He thought I was too busy—he never understood….

“Well—and then last year he sent for me again—you remember. It was after his illness, and he told me he’d grown twenty years older and that he wanted her to grow older too—he didn’t want her to be left behind. The doctors all thought he was going to get well at that time, and he thought so too; and so did I when I first looked at him. But when I turned to the picture—ah, now I don’t ask you to believe me; but I swear it was her face that told me he was dying, and that she wanted him to know it! She had a message for him and she made me deliver it.”

He rose abruptly and walked toward the portrait; then he sat down beside me again.

“Cruel? Yes, it seemed so to me at first; and this time, if I resisted, it was for his sake and not for mine. But all the while I felt her eyes drawing me, and gradually she made me understand. If she’d been there in the flesh (she seemed to say) wouldn’t she have seen before any of us that he was dying? Wouldn’t he have read the news first in her face? And wouldn’t it be horrible if now he should discover it instead in strange eyes?—Well—that was what she wanted of me and I did it—I kept them together to the last!” He looked up at the picture again. “But now she belongs to me,” he repeated….

THE CONFESSIONAL

When I was a young man I thought a great deal of local color. At that time it was still a pigment of recent discovery, and supposed to have a peculiarly stimulating effect on the mental eye. As an aid to the imagination its value was perhaps overrated; but as an object of pursuit to that vagrant faculty, it had all the merits claimed for it. I certainly never hunted any game better worth my powder; and to a young man with rare holidays and long working hours, its value was enhanced by the fact that one might bring it down at any turn, if only one kept one’s eye alert and one’s hand on the trigger.

Even the large manufacturing city where, for some years, my young enthusiasms were chained to an accountant’s desk, was not without its romantic opportunities. Many of the mill-hands at Dunstable were Italians, and a foreign settlement had formed itself in that unsavory and unsanitary portion of the town known as the Point. The Point, like more aristocratic communities, had its residential and commercial districts, its church, its theatre and its restaurant. When the craving for local color was on me it was my habit to resort to the restaurant, a low-browed wooden building with the appetizing announcement:

“_Aristiù di montone_”

pasted in one of its fly-blown window-panes. Here the consumption of tough macaroni or of an ambiguous frittura sufficed to transport me to the Cappello d’Oro in Venice, while my cup of coffee and a wasp-waisted cigar with a straw in it turned my greasy tablecloth into the marble top of one of the little round tables under the arcade of the Caffè Pedrotti at Padua. This feat of the imagination was materially aided by Agostino, the hollow-eyed and low-collared waiter, whose slimy napkin never lost its Latin flourish and whose zeal for my comfort was not infrequently displayed by his testing the warmth of my soup with his finger. Through Agostino I became acquainted with the inner history of the colony, heard the details of its feuds and vendettas, and learned to know by sight the leading characters in these domestic dramas.

The restaurant was frequented by the chief personages of the community: the overseer of the Italian hands at the Meriton Mills, the doctor, his wife the levatrice (a plump Neapolitan with greasy ringlets, a plush picture-hat, and a charm against the evil-eye hanging in a crease of her neck) and lastly by Don Egidio, the parocco of the little church across the street. The doctor and his wife came only on feast days, but the overseer and Don Egidio were regular patrons. The former was a quiet saturnine-looking man, of accomplished manners but reluctant speech, and I depended for my diversion chiefly on Don Egidio, whose large loosely-hung lips were always ajar for conversation. The remarks issuing from them were richly tinged by the gutturals of the Bergamasque dialect, and it needed but a slight acquaintance with Italian types to detect the Lombard peasant under the priest’s rusty cassock. This inference was confirmed by Don Egidio’s telling me that he came from a village of Val Camonica, the radiant valley which extends northward from the lake of Iseo to the Adamello glaciers. His stepfather had been a laborer on one of the fruit-farms of a Milanese count who owned large estates in the Val Camonica; and that gentleman, taking a fancy to the lad, whom he had seen at work in his orchards, had removed him to his villa on the lake of Iseo and had subsequently educated him for the Church.

It was doubtless to this picturesque accident that Don Egidio owed the mingling of ease and simplicity that gave an inimitable charm to his stout shabby presence. It was as though some wild mountain-fruit had been transplanted to the Count’s orchards and had mellowed under cultivation without losing its sylvan flavor. I have never seen the social art carried farther without suggestion of artifice. The fact that Don Egidio’s amenities were mainly exercised on the mill-hands composing his parish proved the genuineness of his gift. It is easier to simulate gentility among gentlemen than among navvies; and the plain man is a touchstone who draws out all the alloy in the gold.

Among his parishioners Don Egidio ruled with the cheerful despotism of the good priest. On cardinal points he was inflexible, but in minor matters he had that elasticity of judgment which enables the Catholic discipline to fit itself to every inequality of the human conscience. There was no appeal from his verdict; but his judgment-seat was a revolving chair from which he could view the same act at various angles. His influence was acknowledged not only by his flock, but by the policeman at the corner, the “bar-keep’” in the dive, the ward politician in the corner grocery. The general verdict of Dunstable was that the Point would have been hell without the priest. It was perhaps not precisely heaven with him; but such light of the upper sky as pierced its murky atmosphere was reflected from Don Egidio’s countenance. It is hardly possible for any one to exercise such influence without taking pleasure in it; and on the whole the priest was probably a contented man; though it does not follow that he was a happy one. On this point the first stages of our acquaintance yielded much food for conjecture. At first sight Don Egidio was the image of cheerfulness. He had all the physical indications of a mind at ease: the leisurely rolling gait, the ready laugh, the hospitable eye of the man whose sympathies are always on the latch. It took me some time to discover under his surface garrulity the impenetrable reticence of his profession, and under his enjoyment of trifles a levelling melancholy which made all enjoyment trifling. Don Egidio’s aspect and conversation were so unsuggestive of psychological complexities that I set down this trait to poverty or homesickness. There are few classes of men more frugal in tastes and habit than the village priest in Italy; but Don Egidio, by his own account, had been introduced, at an impressionable age, to a way of living that must have surpassed his wildest dreams of self-indulgence. To whatever privations his parochial work had since accustomed him, the influences of that earlier life were too perceptible in his talk not to have made a profound impression on his tastes; and he remained, for all his apostolic simplicity, the image of the family priest who has his seat at the rich man’s table.

It chanced that I had used one of my short European holidays to explore afoot the romantic passes connecting the Valtelline with the lake of Iseo; and my remembrance of that enchanting region made it seem impossible that Don Egidio should ever look without a reminiscent pang on the grimy perspective of his parochial streets. The transition was too complete, too ironical, from those rich glades and Titianesque acclivities to the brick hovels and fissured sidewalks of the Point.

This impression was confirmed when Don Egidio, in response to my urgent invitation, paid his first visit to my modest lodgings. He called one winter evening, when a wood-fire in its happiest humor was giving a factitious lustre to my bookshelves and bringing out the values of the one or two old prints and Chinese porcelains that accounted for the perennial shabbiness of my wardrobe.

“Ah,” said he with a murmur of satisfaction, as he laid aside his shiny hat and bulging umbrella, “it is a long time since I have been in a casa signorile.”

My remembrance of his own room (he lodged with the doctor and the levatrice) saved this epithet from the suggestion of irony and kept me silent while he sank into my armchair with the deliberation of a tired traveller lowering himself gently into a warm bath.

“Good! good!” he repeated, looking about him. “Books, porcelains, objects of _virtù_—I am glad to see that there are still such things in the world!” And he turned a genial eye on the glass of Marsala that I had poured out for him.

Don Egidio was the most temperate of men and never exceeded his one glass; but he liked to sit by the hour puffing at my Cabanas, which I suspected him of preferring to the black weed of his native country. Under the influence of my tobacco he became even more blandly garrulous, and I sometimes fancied that of all the obligations of his calling none could have placed such a strain on him as that of preserving the secrets of the confessional. He often talked of his early life at the Count’s villa, where he had been educated with his patron’s two sons till he was of age to be sent to the seminary; and I could see that the years spent in simple and familiar intercourse with his benefactors had been the most vivid chapter in his experience. The Italian peasant’s inarticulate tenderness for the beauty of his birthplace had been specialized in him by contact with cultivated tastes, and he could tell me not only that the Count had a “stupendous” collection of pictures, but that the chapel of the villa contained a sepulchral monument by Bambaja, and that the art-critics were divided as to the authenticity of the Leonardo in the family palace at Milan.

On all these subjects he was inexhaustibly voluble; but there was one point which he always avoided, and that was his reason for coming to America. I remember the round turn with which he brought me up when I questioned him.

“A priest,” said he, “is a soldier and must obey orders like a soldier.” He set down his glass of Marsala and strolled across the room. “I had not observed,” he went on, “that you have here a photograph of the Sposalizio of the Brera. What a picture! _È stupendo_!” and he turned back to his seat and smilingly lit a fresh cigar.

I saw at once that I had hit on a point where his native garrulity was protected by the chain-mail of religious discipline that every Catholic priest wears beneath his cassock. I had too much respect for my friend to wish to penetrate his armor, and now and then I almost fancied he was grateful to me for not putting his reticence to the test.

Don Egidio must have been past sixty when I made his acquaintance; but it was not till the close of an exceptionally harsh winter, some five or six years after our first meeting, that I began to think of him as an old man. It was as though the long-continued cold had cracked and shrivelled him. He had grown bent and hollow-chested and his lower lip shook like an unhinged door. The summer heat did little to revive him, and in September, when I came home from my vacation, I found him just recovering from an attack of pneumonia. That autumn he did not care to venture often into the night air, and now and then I used to go and sit with him in his little room, to which I had contributed the unheard-of luxuries of an easy-chair and a gas-stove.

My engagements, however, made these visits infrequent, and several weeks had elapsed without my seeing the parocco when, one snowy November morning, I ran across him in the railway-station. I was on my way to New York for the day and had just time to wave a greeting to him as I jumped into the railway-carriage; but a moment later, to my surprise, I saw him stiffly clambering into the same train. I found him seated in the common car, with his umbrella between his knees and a bundle done up in a red cotton handkerchief on the seat at his side. The caution with which, at my approach, he transferred this bundle to his arms caused me to glance at it in surprise; and he answered my look by saying with a smile:

“They are flowers for the dead—the most exquisite flowers—from the greenhouses of Mr. Meriton—si figuri!” And he waved a descriptive hand. “One of my lads, Gianpietro, is employed by the gardener there, and every year on this day he brings me a beautiful bunch of flowers—for such a purpose it is no sin,” he added, with the charming Italian pliancy of judgment.

“And why are you travelling in this snowy weather, signor parocco?” I asked, as he ended with a cough.

He fixed me gravely with his simple shallow eye. “Because it is the day of the dead, my son,” he said, “and I go to place these on the grave of the noblest man that ever lived.”

“You are going to New York?”

“To Brooklyn—”

I hesitated a moment, wishing to question him, yet uncertain whether his replies were curtailed by the persistency of his cough or by the desire to avoid interrogation.

“This is no weather to be travelling with such a cough,” I said at length.

He made a deprecating gesture.

“I have never missed the day—not once in eighteen years. But for me he would have no one!” He folded his hands on his umbrella and looked away from me to hide the trembling of his lip.

I resolved on a last attempt to storm his confidence. “Your friend is buried in Calvary cemetery?”

He signed an assent.

“That is a long way for you to go alone, signor parocco. The streets are sure to be slippery and there is an icy wind blowing. Give me your flowers and let me send them to the cemetery by a messenger. I give you my word they shall reach their destination safely.”

He turned a quiet look on me. “My son, you are young,” he said, “and you don’t know how the dead need us.” He drew his breviary from his pocket and opened it with a smile. “Mi scusi?” he murmured.

The business which had called me to town obliged me to part from him as soon as the train entered the station, and in my dash for the street I left his unwieldy figure laboring far behind me through the crowd on the platform. Before we separated, however, I had learned that he was returning to Dunstable by the four o’clock train, and had resolved to despatch my business in time to travel home with him. When I reached Wall Street I was received with the news that the man I had appointed to meet was ill and detained in the country. My business was “off” and I found myself with the rest of the day at my disposal. I had no difficulty in deciding how to employ my time. I was at an age when, in such contingencies, there is always a feminine alternative; and even now I don’t know how it was that, on my way to a certain hospitable luncheon-table, I suddenly found myself in a cab which was carrying me at full-speed to the Twenty-third Street ferry. It was not till I had bought my ticket and seated myself in the varnished tunnel of the ferry-boat that I was aware of having been diverted from my purpose by an overmastering anxiety for Don Egidio. I rapidly calculated that he had not more than an hour’s advance on me, and that, allowing for my greater agility and for the fact that I had a cab at my call, I was likely to reach the cemetery in time to see him under shelter before the gusts of sleet that were already sweeping across the river had thickened to a snow-storm.

At the gates of the cemetery I began to take a less sanguine view of my attempt. The commemorative anniversary had filled the silent avenues with visitors, and I felt the futility of my quest as I tried to fix the gatekeeper’s attention on my delineation of a stout Italian priest with a bad cough and a bunch of flowers tied up in a red cotton handkerchief. The gatekeeper showed that delusive desire to oblige that is certain to send its victims in the wrong direction; but I had the presence of mind to go exactly contrary to his indication, and thanks to this precaution I came, after half an hour’s search, on the figure of my poor parocco, kneeling on the wet ground in one of the humblest by-ways of the great necropolis. The mound before which he knelt was strewn with the spoils of Mr. Meriton’s conservatories, and on the weather-worn tablet at its head I read the inscription:

IL CONTE SIVIANO DA MILANO.

Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus.

So engrossed was Don Egidio that for some moments I stood behind him unobserved; and when he rose and faced me, grief had left so little room for any minor emotion that he looked at me almost without surprise.

“Don Egidio,” I said, “I have a carriage waiting for you at the gate. You must come home with me.”

He nodded quietly and I drew his hand through my arm.

He turned back to the grave. “One moment, my son,” he said. “It may be for the last time.” He stood motionless, his eyes on the heaped-up flowers which were already bruised and blackened by the cold. “To leave him alone—after sixty years! But God is everywhere—” he murmured as I led him away.

On the journey home he did not care to talk, and my chief concern was to keep him wrapped in my greatcoat and to see that his bed was made ready as soon as I had restored him to his lodgings. The levatrice brought a quilted coverlet from her own room and hovered over him as gently as though he had been of the sex to require her services; while Agostino, at my summons, appeared with a bowl of hot soup that was heralded down the street by a reviving waft of garlic. To these ministrations I left the parocco, intending to call for news of him the next evening; but an unexpected pressure of work kept me late at my desk, and the following day some fresh obstacle delayed me.

On the third afternoon, as I was leaving the office, an agate-eyed infant from the Point hailed me with a message from the doctor. The parocco was worse and had asked for me. I jumped into the nearest car and ten minutes later was running up the doctor’s greasy stairs.

To my dismay I found Don Egidio’s room cold and untenanted; but I was reassured a moment later by the appearance of the levatrice, who announced that she had transferred the blessed man to her own apartment, where he could have the sunlight and a good bed to lie in. There in fact he lay, weak but smiling, in a setting which contrasted oddly enough with his own monastic surroundings: a cheerful grimy room, hung with anecdotic chromos, photographs of lady-patients proudly presenting their offspring to the camera, and innumerable Neapolitan santolini decked out with shrivelled palm-leaves.

The levatrice whispered that the good man had the pleurisy, and that, as she phrased it, he was nearing his last milestone. I saw that he was in fact in a bad way, but his condition did not indicate any pressing danger, and I had the presentiment that he would still, as the saying is, put up a good fight. It was clear, however, that he knew what turn the conflict must take, and the solemnity with which he welcomed me showed that my summons was a part of that spiritual strategy with which the Catholic opposes the surprise of death.

“My son,” he said, when the levatrice had left us, “I have a favor to ask you. You found me yesterday bidding goodbye to my best friend.” His cough interrupted him. “I have never told you,” he went on, “the name of the family in which I was brought up. It was Siviano, and that was the grave of the Count’s eldest son, with whom I grew up as a brother. For eighteen years he has lain in that strange ground—_in terra aliena_—and when I die, there will be no one to care for his grave.”

I saw what he waited for. “I will care for it, signor parocco.”

“I knew I should have your promise, my child; and what you promise you keep. But my friend is a stranger to you—you are young and at your age life is a mistress who kisses away sad memories. Why should you remember the grave of a stranger? I cannot lay such a claim on you. But I will tell you his story—and then I think that neither joy nor grief will let you forget him; for when you rejoice you will remember how he sorrowed; and when you sorrow the thought of him will be like a friend’s hand in yours.”

II

You tell me (Don Egidio began) that you know our little lake; and if you have seen it you will understand why it always used to remind me of the “garden enclosed” of the Canticles.

_Hortus inclusus; columba mea in foraminibus petræ_: the words used to come back to me whenever I returned from a day’s journey across the mountains, and looking down saw the blue lake far below, hidden in its hills like a happy secret in a stern heart. We were never envious of the glory of the great lakes. They are like the show pictures that some nobleman hangs in his public gallery; but our Iseo is the treasure that he hides in his inner chamber.

You tell me you saw it in summer, when it looks up like a saint’s eye, reflecting the whole of heaven. It was then too that I first saw it. My future friend, the old Count, had found me at work on one of his fruit-farms up the valley, and hearing that I was ill-treated by my stepfather—a drunken pedlar from the Val Mastellone, whom my poor mother a year or two earlier had come across at the fair of Lovere—he had taken me home with him to Iseo. I used to serve mass in our hill-village of Cerveno, and the village children called me “the little priest” because when my work was done I often crept back to the church to get away from my stepfather’s blows and curses. “I will make a real priest of him,” the Count declared; and that afternoon, perched on the box of his travelling-carriage, I was whirled away from the dark scenes of my childhood into a world, where, as it seemed to me, every one was as happy as an angel on a presepio.

I wonder if you remember the Count’s villa? It lies on the shore of the lake, facing the green knoll of Monte Isola, and overlooked by the village of Siviano and by the old parish-church where I said mass for fifteen happy years. The village hangs on a ledge of the mountain; but the villa dips its foot in the lake, smiling at its reflection like a bather lingering on the brink. What Paradise it seemed to me that day! In our church up the valley there hung an old brown picture, with a Saint Sabastian in the foreground; and behind him the most wonderful palace, with terraced gardens adorned with statues and fountains, where fine folk in resplendent dresses walked up and down without heeding the blessed martyr’s pangs. The Count’s villa, with its terraces, its roses, its marble steps descending to the lake, reminded me of that palace; only instead of being inhabited by wicked people engrossed in their selfish pleasures it was the home of the kindest friends that ever took a poor lad by the hand.

The old Count was a widower when I first knew him. He had been twice married, and his first wife had left him two children, a son and a daughter. The eldest, Donna Marianna, was then a girl of twenty, who kept her father’s house and was a mother to the two lads. She was not handsome or learned, and had no taste for the world; but she was like the lavender-plant in a poor man’s window—just a little gray flower, but a sweetness that fills the whole house. Her brother, Count Roberto, had been ailing from his birth, and was a studious lad with a melancholy musing face such as you may see in some of Titian’s portraits of young men. He looked like an exiled prince dressed in mourning. There was one child by the second marriage, Count Andrea, a boy of my own age, handsome as a Saint George, but not as kind as the others. No doubt, being younger, he was less able to understand why an uncouth peasant lad should have been brought to his father’s table; and the others were so fearful of hurting my feelings that, but for his teasing, I might never have mended my clumsy manners or learned how to behave in the presence of my betters. Count Andrea was not sparing in such lessons, and Count Roberto, in spite of his weak arms, chastised his brother roundly when he thought the discipline had been too severe; but for my part it seemed to me natural enough that such a godlike being should lord it over a poor clodhopper like myself.

Well—I will not linger over the beginning of my new life for my story has to do with its close. Only I should like to make you understand what the change meant to me—an ignorant peasant lad, coming from hard words and blows and a smoke-blackened hut in the hills to that great house full of rare and beautiful things, and of beings who seemed to me even more rare and beautiful. Do you wonder I was ready to kiss the ground they trod, and would have given the last drop of my blood to serve them?

In due course I was sent to the seminary at Lodi; and on holidays I used to visit the family in Milan. Count Andrea was growing up to be one of the handsomest young men imaginable, but a trifle wild; and the old Count married him in haste to the daughter of a Venetian noble, who brought as her dower a great estate in Istria. The Countess Gemma, as this lady was called, was as light as thistledown and had an eye like a baby’s; but while she was cooing for the moon her pretty white hands were always stealing toward something within reach that she had not been meant to have. The old Count was not alert enough to follow these manoeuvres; and the Countess hid her designs under a torrent of guileless chatter, as pick-pockets wear long sleeves to conceal their movements. Her only fault, he used to say, was that one of her aunts had married an Austrian; and this event having taken place before she was born he laughingly acquitted her of any direct share in it. She confirmed his good opinion of her by giving her husband two sons; and Roberto showing no inclination to marry, these boys naturally came to be looked on as the heirs of the house.

Meanwhile I had finished my course of studies, and the old Count, on my twenty-first birthday, had appointed me priest of the parish of Siviano. It was the year of Count Andrea’s marriage and there were great festivities at the villa. Three years later the old Count died, to the sorrow of his two eldest children. Donna Marianna and Count Roberto closed their apartments in the palace at Milan and withdrew for a year to Siviano. It was then that I first began to know my friend. Before that I had loved him without understanding him; now I learned of what metal he was made. His bookish tastes inclined him to a secluded way of living; and his younger brother perhaps fancied that he would not care to assume the charge of the estate. But if Andrea thought this he was disappointed. Roberto resolutely took up the tradition of his father’s rule, and, as if conscious of lacking the old Count’s easy way with the peasants, made up for it by a redoubled zeal for their welfare. I have seen him toil for days to adjust some trifling difficulty that his father would have set right with a ready word; like the sainted bishop who, when a beggar asked him for a penny, cried out: “Alas, my brother, I have not a penny in my purse; but here are two gold pieces, if they can be made to serve you instead!” We had many conferences over the condition of his people, and he often sent me up the valley to look into the needs of the peasantry on the fruit-farms. No grievance was too trifling for him to consider it, no abuse too deep-seated for him to root it out; and many an hour that other men of his rank would have given to books or pleasure was devoted to adjusting a quarrel about boundary-lines or to weighing the merits of a complaint against the tax-collector. I often said that he was as much his people’s priest as I; and he smiled and answered that every landowner was a king and that in old days the king was always a priest.

Donna Marianna was urgent with him to marry, but he always declared that he had a family in his tenantry, and that, as for a wife, she had never let him feel the want of one. He had that musing temper which gives a man a name for coldness; though in fact he may all the while be storing fuel for a great conflagration. But to me he whispered another reason for not marrying. A man, he said, does not take wife and rejoice while his mother is on her deathbed; and Italy, his mother, lay dying, with the foreign vultures waiting to tear her apart.

You are too young to know anything of those days, my son; and how can any one understand them who did not live through them? Italy lay dying indeed; but Lombardy was her heart, and the heart still beat, and sent the faint blood creeping to her cold extremities. Her torturers, weary of their work, had allowed her to fall into a painless stupor; but just as she was sinking from sleep to death, heaven sent Radetsky to scourge her back to consciousness; and at the first sting of his lash she sprang maimed and bleeding to her feet.

Ah, those days, those days, my son! Italy—Italy—was the word on our lips; but the thought in our hearts was just Austria. We clamored for liberty, unity, the franchise; but under our breath we prayed only to smite the white-coats. Remove the beam from our eye, we cried, and we shall see our salvation clearly enough! We priests in the north were all liberals and worked with the nobles and the men of letters. Gioberti was our breviary and his Holiness the new Pope was soon to be the Tancred of our crusade. But meanwhile, mind you, all this went on in silence, underground as it were, while on the surface Lombardy still danced, feasted, married, and took office under the Austrian. In the iron-mines up our valley there used to be certain miners who stayed below ground for months at a time; and, like one of these, Roberto remained buried in his purpose, while life went its way overhead. Though I was not in his confidence I knew well enough where his thoughts were, for he went among us with the eye of a lover, the visionary look of one who hears a Voice. We all heard that Voice, to be sure, mingling faintly with the other noises of life; but to Roberto it was already as the roar of mighty waters, drowning every other sound with its thunder.

On the surface, as I have said, things looked smooth enough. An Austrian cardinal throned in Milan and an Austrian-hearted Pope ruled in Rome. In Lombardy, Austria couched like a beast of prey, ready to spring at our throats if we stirred or struggled. The Moderates, to whose party Count Roberto belonged, talked of prudence, compromise, the education of the masses; but if their words were a velvet sheath their thought was a dagger. For many years, as you know, the Milanese had maintained an outward show of friendliness with their rulers. The nobles had accepted office under the vice-roy, and in the past there had been frequent intermarriage between the two aristocracies. But now, one by one, the great houses had closed their doors against official society. Though some of the younger and more careless, those who must dance and dine at any cost, still went to the palace and sat beside the enemy at the opera, fashion was gradually taking sides against them, and those who had once been laughed at as old fogeys were now applauded as patriots. Among these, of course, was Count Roberto, who for several years had refused to associate with the Austrians, and had silently resented his easygoing brother’s disregard of political distinctions. Andrea and Gemma belonged to the moth tribe, who flock to the brightest light; and Gemma’s Istrian possessions, and her family’s connection with the Austrian nobility, gave them a pretext for fluttering about the viceregal candle. Roberto let them go their way, but his own course was a tacit protest against their conduct. They were always welcome at the palazzo Siviano; but he and Donna Marianna withdrew from society in order to have an excuse for not showing themselves at the Countess Gemma’s entertainments. If Andrea and Gemma were aware of his disapproval they were clever enough to ignore it; for the rich elder brother who paid their debts and never meant to marry was too important a person to be quarrelled with on political grounds. They seemed to think that if he married it would be only to spite them; and they were persuaded that their future depended on their giving him no cause to take such reprisals. I shall never be more than a plain peasant at heart and I have little natural skill in discerning hidden motives; but the experience of the confessional gives every priest a certain insight into the secret springs of action, and I often wondered that the worldly wisdom of Andrea and Gemma did not help them to a clearer reading of their brother’s character. For my part I knew that, in Roberto’s heart, no great passion could spring from a mean motive; and I had always thought that if he ever loved any woman as he loved Italy, it must be from his country’s hand that he received his bride. And so it came about.

Have you ever noticed, on one of those still autumn days before a storm, how here and there a yellow leaf will suddenly detach itself from the bough and whirl through the air as though some warning of the gale had reached it? So it was then in Lombardy. All round was the silence of decay; but now and then a word, a look, a trivial incident, fluttered ominously through the stillness. It was in ‘45. Only a year earlier the glorious death of the Bandiera brothers had sent a long shudder through Italy. In the Romagna, Renzi and his comrades had tried to uphold by action the protest set forth in the “Manifesto of Rimini”; and their failure had sowed the seed which d’Azeglio and Cavour were to harvest. Everywhere the forces were silently gathering; and nowhere was the hush more profound, the least reverberation more audible, than in the streets of Milan.

It was Count Roberto’s habit to attend early mass in the Cathedral; and one morning, as he was standing in the aisle, a young girl passed him with her father. Roberto knew the father, a beggarly Milanese of the noble family of Intelvi, who had cut himself off from his class by accepting an appointment in one of the government offices. As the two went by he saw a group of Austrian officers looking after the girl, and heard one of them say: “Such a choice morsel as that is too good for slaves;” and another answer with a laugh: “Yes, it’s a dish for the master’s table!”

The girl heard too. She was as white as a wind-flower and he saw the words come out on her cheek like the red mark from a blow. She whispered to her father, but he shook his head and drew her away without so much as a glance at the Austrians. Roberto heard mass and then hastened out and placed himself in the porch of the Cathedral. A moment later the officers appeared, and they too stationed themselves near the doorway. Presently the girl came out on her father’s arm. Her admirers stepped forward to greet Intelvi; and the cringing wretch stood there exchanging compliments with them, while their insolent stare devoured his daughter’s beauty. She, poor thing, shook like a leaf, and her eyes, in avoiding theirs, suddenly encountered Roberto’s. Her look was a wounded bird that flew to him for shelter. He carried it away in his breast and its live warmth beat against his heart. He thought that Italy had looked at him through those eyes; for love is the wiliest of masqueraders and has a thousand disguises at his command.

Within a month Faustina Intelvi was his wife. Donna Marianna and I rejoiced; for we knew he had chosen her because he loved her, and she seemed to us almost worthy of such a choice. As for Count Andrea and his wife, I leave you to guess what ingredients were mingled in the kiss with which they welcomed the bride. They were all smiles at Roberto’s marriage, and had only words of praise for his wife. Donna Marianna, who had sometimes taxed me with suspecting their motives, rejoiced in this fresh proof of their magnanimity; but for my part I could have wished to see them a little less kind. All such twilight fears, however, vanished in the flush of my friend’s happiness. Over some natures love steals gradually, as the morning light widens across a valley; but it had flashed on Roberto like the leap of dawn to a snowpeak. He walked the world with the wondering step of a blind man suddenly restored to sight; and once he said to me with a laugh: “Love makes a Columbus of every one of us!”

And the Countess—? The Countess, my son, was eighteen, and her husband was forty. Count Roberto had the heart of a poet, but he walked with a limp and his skin was sallow. Youth plucks the fruit for its color rather than its flavor; and first love does not serenade its mistress on a church-organ. In Italy girls are married as land is sold; if two estates adjoin two lives are united. As for the portionless girl, she is a knick-knack that goes to the highest bidder. Faustina was handed over to her purchaser as if she had been a picture for his gallery; and the transaction doubtless seemed as natural to her as to her parents. She walked to the altar like an Iphigenia; but pallor becomes a bride, and it looks well for a daughter to weep on leaving her mother. Perhaps it would have been different if she had guessed that the threshold of her new home was carpeted with love and its four corners hung with tender thoughts of her; but her husband was a silent man, who never called attention to his treasures.

The great palace in Milan was a gloomy house for a girl to enter. Roberto and his sister lived in it as if it had been a monastery, going nowhere and receiving only those who labored for the Cause. To Faustina, accustomed to the easy Austrian society, the Sunday evening receptions at the palazzo Siviano must have seemed as dreary as a scientific congress. It pleased Roberto to regard her as a victim of barbarian insolence, an embodiment of his country desecrated by the desire of the enemy; but though, like any handsome penniless girl, Faustina had now and then been exposed to a free look or a familiar word, I doubt if she connected such incidents with the political condition of Italy. She knew, of course, that in marrying Siviano she was entering a house closed against the Austrian. One of Siviano’s first cares had been to pension his father-in-law, with the stipulation that Intelvi should resign his appointment and give up all relations with the government; and the old hypocrite, only too glad to purchase idleness on such terms, embraced the liberal cause with a zeal which left his daughter no excuse for half-heartedness. But he found it less easy than he had expected to recover a footing among his own people. In spite of his patriotic bluster the Milanese held aloof from him; and being the kind of man who must always take his glass in company he gradually drifted back to his old associates. It was impossible to forbid Faustina to visit her parents; and in their house she breathed an air that was at least tolerant of Austria.

But I must not let you think that the young Countess appeared ungrateful or unhappy. She was silent and shy, and it needed a more enterprising temper than Roberto’s to break down the barrier between them. They seemed to talk to one another through a convent-grating, rather than across a hearth; but if Roberto had asked more of her than she could give, outwardly she was a model wife. She chose me at once as her confessor and I watched over the first steps of her new life. Never was younger sister tenderer to her elder than she to Donna Marianna; never was young wife more mindful of her religious duties, kinder to her dependents, more charitable to the poor; yet to be with her was like living in a room with shuttered windows. She was always the caged bird, the transplanted flower: for all Roberto’s care she never bloomed or sang.

Donna Marianna was the first to speak of it. “The child needs more light and air,” she said.

“Light? Air?” Roberto repeated. “Does she not go to mass every morning? Does she not drive on the Corso every evening?”

Donna Marianna was not called clever, but her heart was wiser than most women’s heads.

“At our age, brother,” said she, “the windows of the mind face north and look out on a landscape full of lengthening shadows. Faustina needs another outlook. She is as pale as a hyacinth grown in a cellar.”

Roberto himself turned pale and I saw that she had uttered his own thought.

“You want me to let her go to Gemma’s!” he exclaimed.

“Let her go wherever there is a little careless laughter.”

“Laughter—now!” he cried, with a gesture toward the sombre line of portraits above his head.

“Let her laugh while she can, my brother.”

That evening after dinner he called Faustina to him.

“My child,” he said, “go and put on your jewels. Your sister Gemma gives a ball tonight and the carriage waits to take you there. I am too much of a recluse to be at ease in such scenes, but I have sent word to your father to go with you.”

Andrea and Gemma welcomed their young sister-in-law with effusion, and from that time she was often in their company. Gemma forbade any mention of politics in her drawingroom, and it was natural that Faustina should be glad to escape from the solemn conclaves of the palazzo Siviano to a house where life went as gaily as in that villa above Florence where Boccaccio’s careless story-tellers took refuge from the plague. But meanwhile the political distemper was rapidly spreading, and in spite of Gemma’s Austrian affiliations it was no longer possible for her to receive the enemy openly. It was whispered that her door was still ajar to her old friends; but the rumor may have risen from the fact that one of the Austrian cavalry officers stationed at Milan was her own cousin, the son of the aunt on whose misalliance the old Count had so often bantered her. No one could blame the Countess Gemma for not turning her own flesh and blood out of doors; and the social famine to which the officers of the garrison were reduced made it natural that young Welkenstern should press the claims of consanguinity.

All this must have reached Roberto’s ears; but he made no sign and his wife came and went as she pleased. When they returned the following year to the old dusky villa at Siviano she was like the voice of a brook in a twilight wood: one could not look at her without ransacking the spring for new similes to paint her freshness. With Roberto it was different. I found him older, more preoccupied and silent; but I guessed that his preoccupations were political, for when his eye rested on his wife it cleared like the lake when a cloud-shadow lifts from it.

Count Andrea and his wife occupied an adjoining villa; and during the villeggiatura the two households lived almost as one family. Roberto, however, was often absent in Milan, called thither on business of which the nature was not hard to guess. Sometimes he brought back guests to the villa; and on these occasions Faustina and Donna Marianna went to Count Andrea’s for the day. I have said that I was not in his confidence; but he knew my sympathies were with the liberals and now and then he let fall a word of the work going on underground. Meanwhile the new Pope had been elected, and from Piedmont to Calabria we hailed in him the Banner that was to lead our hosts to war.

So time passed and we reached the last months of ‘47. The villa on Iseo had been closed since the end of August. Roberto had no great liking for his gloomy palace in Milan, and it had been his habit to spend nine months of the year at Siviano; but he was now too much engrossed in his work to remain away from Milan, and his wife and sister had joined him there as soon as the midsummer heat was over. During the autumn he had called me once or twice to the city to consult me on business connected with his fruit-farms; and in the course of our talks he had sometimes let fall a hint of graver matters. It was in July of that year that a troop of Croats had marched into Ferrara, with muskets and cannon loaded. The lighted matches of their cannon had fired the sleeping hate of Austria, and the whole country now echoed the Lombard cry: “Out with the barbarian!” All talk of adjustment, compromise, reorganization, shrivelled on lips that the live coal of patriotism had touched. Italy for the Italians, and then—monarchy, federation, republic, it mattered not what!

The oppressor’s grip had tightened on our throats and the clear-sighted saw well enough that Metternich’s policy was to provoke a rebellion and then crush it under the Croat heel. But it was too late to cry prudence in Lombardy. With the first days of the new year the tobacco riots had drawn blood in Milan. Soon afterward the Lions’ Club was closed, and edicts were issued forbidding the singing of Pio Nono’s hymn, the wearing of white and blue, the collecting of subscriptions for the victims of the riots. To each prohibition Milan returned a fresh defiance. The ladies of the nobility put on mourning for the rioters who had been shot down by the soldiery. Half the members of the Guardia Nobile resigned and Count Borromeo sent back his Golden Fleece to the Emperor. Fresh regiments were continually pouring into Milan and it was no secret that Radetsky was strengthening the fortifications. Late in January several leading liberals were arrested and sent into exile, and two weeks later martial law was proclaimed in Milan. At the first arrests several members of the liberal party had hastily left Milan, and I was not surprised to hear, a few days later, that orders had been given to reopen the villa at Siviano. The Count and Countess arrived there early in February.

It was seven months since I had seen the Countess, and I was struck with the change in her appearance.

She was paler than ever, and her step had lost its lightness. Yet she did not seem to share her husband’s political anxieties; one would have said that she was hardly aware of them. She seemed wrapped in a veil of lassitude, like Iseo on a still gray morning, when dawn is blood-red on the mountains but a mist blurs its reflection in the lake. I felt as though her soul were slipping away from me, and longed to win her back to my care; but she made her ill-health a pretext for not coming to confession, and for the present I could only wait and carry the thought of her to the altar. She had not been long at Siviano before I discovered that this drooping mood was only one phase of her humor. Now and then she flung back the cowl of melancholy and laughed life in the eye; but next moment she was in shadow again, and her muffled thoughts had given us the slip. She was like the lake on one of those days when the wind blows twenty ways and every promontory holds a gust in ambush.

Meanwhile there was a continual coming and going of messengers between Siviano and the city. They came mostly at night, when the household slept, and were away again with the last shadows; but the news they brought stayed and widened, shining through every cranny of the old house. The whole of Lombardy was up. From Pavia to Mantua, from Como to Brescia, the streets ran blood like the arteries of one great body. At Pavia and Padua the universities were closed. The frightened vice-roy was preparing to withdraw from Milan to Verona, and Radetsky continued to pour his men across the Alps, till a hundred thousand were massed between the Piave and the Ticino. And now every eye was turned to Turin. Ah, how we watched for the blue banner of Piedmont on the mountains! Charles Albert was pledged to our cause; his whole people had armed to rescue us, the streets echoed with avanti, Savoia! and yet Savoy was silent and hung back. Each day was a lifetime strained to the cracking-point with hopes and disappointments. We reckoned the hours by rumors, the very minutes by hearsay. Then suddenly—ah, it was worth living through!—word came to us that Vienna was in revolt. The points of the compass had shifted and our sun had risen in the north. I shall never forget that day at the villa. Roberto sent for me early, and I found him smiling and resolute, as becomes a soldier on the eve of action. He had made all his preparations to leave for Milan and was awaiting a summons from his party. The whole household felt that great events impended, and Donna Marianna, awed and tearful, had pleaded with her brother that they should all receive the sacrament together the next morning. Roberto and his sister had been to confession the previous day, but the Countess Faustina had again excused herself. I did not see her while I was with the Count, but as I left the house she met me in the laurel-walk. The morning was damp and cold, and she had drawn a black scarf over her hair, and walked with a listless dragging step; but at my approach she lifted her head quickly and signed to me to follow her into one of the recesses of clipped laurel that bordered the path.

“Don Egidio,” she said, “you have heard the news?”

I assented.

“The Count goes to Milan tomorrow?”

“It seems probable, your excellency.”

“There will be fighting—we are on the eve of war, I mean?”

“We are in God’s hands, your excellency.”

“In God’s hands!” she murmured. Her eyes wandered and for a moment we stood silent; then she drew a purse from her pocket. “I was forgetting,” she exclaimed. “This is for that poor girl you spoke to me about the other day—what was her name? The girl who met the Austrian soldier at the fair at Peschiera—”

“Ah, Vannina,” I said; “but she is dead, your excellency.”

“Dead!” She turned white and the purse dropped from her hand. I picked it up and held it out to her, but she put back my hand. “That is for masses, then,” she said; and with that she moved away toward the house.

I walked on to the gate; but before I had reached it I heard her step behind me.

“Don Egidio!” she called; and I turned back.

“You are coming to say mass in the chapel tomorrow morning?”

“That is the Count’s wish.”

She wavered a moment. “I am not well enough to walk up to the village this afternoon,” she said at length. “Will you come back later and hear my confession here?”

“Willingly, your excellency.”

“Come at sunset then.” She looked at me gravely. “It is a long time since I have been to confession,” she added.

“My child, the door of heaven is always unlatched.”

She made no answer and I went my way.

I returned to the villa a little before sunset, hoping for a few words with Roberto. I felt with Faustina that we were on the eve of war, and the uncertainty of the outlook made me treasure every moment of my friend’s company. I knew he had been busy all day, but hoped to find that his preparations were ended and that he could spare me a half hour. I was not disappointed; for the servant who met me asked me to follow him to the Count’s apartment. Roberto was sitting alone, with his back to the door, at a table spread with maps and papers. He stood up and turned an ashen face on me.

“Roberto!” I cried, as if we had been boys together.

He signed to me to be seated.

“Egidio,” he said suddenly, “my wife has sent for you to confess her?”

“The Countess met me on my way home this morning and expressed a wish to receive the sacrament tomorrow morning with you and Donna Marianna, and I promised to return this afternoon to hear her confession.”

Roberto sat silent, staring before him as though he hardly heard. At length he raised his head and began to speak.

“You have noticed lately that my wife has been ailing?” he asked.

“Every one must have seen that the Countess is not in her usual health. She has seemed nervous, out of spirits—I have fancied that she might be anxious about your excellency.”

He leaned across the table and laid his wasted hand on mine. “Call me Roberto,” he said.

There was another pause before he went on. “Since I saw you this morning,” he said slowly, “something horrible has happened. After you left I sent for Andrea and Gemma to tell them the news from Vienna and the probability of my being summoned to Milan before night. You know as well as I that we have reached a crisis. There will be fighting within twenty-four hours, if I know my people; and war may follow sooner than we think. I felt it my duty to leave my affairs in Andrea’s hands, and to entrust my wife to his care. Don’t look startled,” he added with a faint smile. “No reasonable man goes on a journey without setting his house in order; and if things take the turn I expect it may be some months before you see me back at Siviano.—But it was not to hear this that I sent for you.” He pushed his chair aside and walked up and down the room with his short limping step. “My God!” he broke out wildly, “how can I say it?—When Andrea had heard me, I saw him exchange a glance with his wife, and she said with that infernal sweet voice of hers, ‘Yes, Andrea, it is our duty.’

“‘Your duty?’ I asked. ‘What is your duty?’

“Andrea wetted his lips with his tongue and looked at her again; and her look was like a blade in his hand.

“‘Your wife has a lover,’ he said.

“She caught my arm as I flung myself on him. He is ten times stronger than I, but you remember how I made him howl for mercy in the old days when he used to bully you.

“‘Let me go,’ I said to his wife. ‘He must live to unsay it.’

“Andrea began to whimper. ‘Oh, my poor brother, I would give my heart’s blood to unsay it!’

“‘The secret has been killing us,’ she chimed in.

“‘The secret? Whose secret? How dare you—?’

“Gemma fell on her knees like a tragedy actress. ‘Strike me—kill me—it is I who am the offender! It was at my house that she met him—’

“‘Him?’

“‘Franz Welkenstern—my cousin,’ she wailed.

“I suppose I stood before them like a stunned ox, for they repeated the name again and again, as if they were not sure of my having heard it.—Not hear it!” he cried suddenly, dropping into a chair and hiding his face in his hands. “Shall I ever on earth hear anything else again?”

He sat a long time with his face hidden and I waited. My head was like a great bronze bell with one thought for the clapper.

After a while he went on in a low deliberate voice, as though his words were balancing themselves on the brink of madness. With strange composure he repeated each detail of his brother’s charges: the meetings in the Countess Gemma’s drawingroom, the innocent friendliness of the two young people, the talk of mysterious visits to a villa outside the Porta Ticinese, the ever-widening circle of scandal that had spread about their names. At first, Andrea said, he and his wife had refused to listen to the reports which reached them. Then, when the talk became too loud, they had sent for Welkenstern, remonstrated with him, implored him to exchange into another regiment; but in vain. The young officer indignantly denied the reports and declared that to leave his post at such a moment would be desertion.

With a laborious accuracy Roberto went on, detailing one by one each incident of the hateful story, till suddenly he cried out, springing from his chair—“And now to leave her with this lie unburied!”

His cry was like the lifting of a gravestone from my breast. “You must not leave her!” I exclaimed.

He shook his head. “I am pledged.”

“This is your first duty.”

“It would be any other man’s; not an Italian’s.”

I was silent: in those days the argument seemed unanswerable.

At length I said: “No harm can come to her while you are away. Donna Marianna and I are here to watch over her. And when you come back—”

He looked at me gravely. “If I come back—”

“Roberto!”

“We are men, Egidio; we both know what is coming. Milan is up already; and there is a rumor that Charles Albert is moving. This year the spring rains will be red in Italy.”

“In your absence not a breath shall touch her!”

“And if I never come back to defend her? They hate her as hell hates, Egidio!—They kept repeating, ‘He is of her own age and youth draws youth—.’ She is in their way, Egidio!”

“Consider, my son. They do not love her, perhaps; but why should they hate her at such cost? She has given you no child.”

“No child!” He paused. “But what if—? She has ailed lately!” he cried, and broke off to grapple with the stabbing thought.

“Roberto! Roberto!” I adjured him.

He jumped up and gripped my arm.

“Egidio! You believe in her?”

“She’s as pure as a lily on the altar!”

“Those eyes are wells of truth—and she has been like a daughter to Marianna.—Egidio! do I look like an old man?”

“Quiet yourself, Roberto,” I entreated.

“Quiet myself? With this sting in my blood? A lover—and an Austrian lover! Oh, Italy, Italy, my bride!”

“I stake my life on her truth,” I cried, “and who knows better than I? Has her soul not lain before me like the bed of a clear stream?”

“And if what you saw there was only the reflection of your faith in her?”

“My son, I am a priest, and the priest penetrates to the soul as the angel passed through the walls of Peter’s prison. I see the truth in her heart as I see Christ in the host!”

“No, no, she is false!” he cried.

I sprang up terrified. “Roberto, be silent!”

He looked at me with a wild incredulous smile. “Poor simple man of God!” he said.

“I would not exchange my simplicity for yours—the dupe of envy’s first malicious whisper!”

“Envy—you think that?”

“Is it questionable?”

“You would stake your life on it?”

“My life!”

“Your faith?”

“My faith!”

“Your vows as a priest?”

“My vows—” I stopped and stared at him. He had risen and laid his hand on my shoulder.

“You see now what I would be at,” he said quietly. “I must take your place presently—”

“My place—?”

“When my wife comes down. You understand me.”

“Ah, now you are quite mad!” I cried breaking away from him.

“Am I?” he returned, maintaining his strange composure. “Consider a moment. She has not confessed to you before since our return from Milan—”

“Her ill-health—”

He cut me short with a gesture. “Yet to-day she sends for you—”

“In order that she may receive the sacrament with you on the eve of your first separation.”

“If that is her only reason her first words will clear her. I must hear those words, Egidio!”

“You are quite mad,” I repeated.

“Strange,” he said slowly. “You stake your life on my wife’s innocence, yet you refuse me the only means of vindicating it!”

“I would give my life for any one of you—but what you ask is not mine to give.”

“The priest first—the man afterward?” he sneered.

“Long afterward!”

He measured me with a contemptuous eye. “We laymen are ready to give the last shred of flesh from our bones, but you priests intend to keep your cassocks whole.”

“I tell you my cassock is not mine,” I repeated.

“And, by God,” he cried, “you are right; for it’s mine! Who put it on your back but my father? What kept it there but my charity? Peasant! beggar! Hear his holiness pontificate!” “Yes,” I said, “I was a peasant and a beggar when your father found me; and if he had left me one I might have been excused for putting my hand to any ugly job that my betters required of me; but he made me a priest, and so set me above all of you, and laid on me the charge of your souls as well as mine.”

He sat down shaken with dreadful tears. “Ah,” he broke out, “would you have answered me thus when we were boys together, and I stood between you and Andrea?”

“If God had given me the strength.”

“You call it strength to make a woman’s soul your stepping-stone to heaven?”

“Her soul is in my care, not yours, my son. She is safe with me.”

“She? But I? I go out to meet death, and leave a worse death behind me!” He leaned over and clutched my arm. “It is not for myself I plead but for her—for her, Egidio! Don’t you see to what a hell you condemn her if I don’t come back? What chance has she against that slow unsleeping hate? Their lies will fasten themselves to her and suck out her life. You and Marianna are powerless against such enemies.”

“You leave her in God’s hands, my son.”

“Easily said—but, ah, priest, if you were a man! What if their poison works in me and I go to battle thinking that every Austrian bullet may be sent by her lover’s hand? What if I die not only to free Italy but to free my wife as well?”

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “My son, I answer for her. Leave your faith in her in my hands and I will keep it whole.”

He stared at me strangely. “And what if your own fail you?”

“In her? Never. I call every saint to witness!”

“And yet—and yet—ah, this is a blind,” he shouted; “you know all and perjure yourself to spare me!”

At that, my son, I felt a knife in my breast. I looked at him in anguish and his gaze was a wall of metal. Mine seemed to slip away from it, like a clawless thing struggling up the sheer side of a precipice.

“You know all,” he repeated, “and you dare not let me hear her!”

“I dare not betray my trust.”

He waved the answer aside.

“Is this a time to quibble over church discipline? If you believed in her you would save her at any cost!”

I said to myself, “Eternity can hold nothing worse than this for me—” and clutched my resolve again like a cross to my bosom.

Just then there was a hand on the door and we heard Donna Marianna.

“Faustina has sent to know if the signar parocco is here.”

“He is here. Bid her come down to the chapel.” Roberta spoke quietly, and closed the door on her so that she should not see his face. We heard her patter away across the brick floor of the salone.

Roberto turned to me. “Egidio!” he said; and all at once I was no more than a straw on the torrent of his will.

The chapel adjoined the room in which we sat. He opened the door, and in the twilight I saw the light glimmering before the Virgin’s shrine and the old carved confessional standing like a cowled watcher in its corner. But I saw it all in a dream; for nothing in heaven or earth was real to me but the iron grip on my shoulder.

“Quick!” he said and drove me forward. I heard him shoot back the bolt of the outer door and a moment later I stood alone in the garden. The sun had set and the cold spring dusk was falling. Lights shone here and there in the long front of the villa; the statues glimmered gray among the thickets. Through the window-pane of the chapel I caught the faint red gleam of the Virgin’s lamp; but I turned my back on it and walked away.

*

All night I lay like a heretic on the fire. Before dawn there came a call from the villa. The Count had received a second summons from Milan and was to set out in an hour. I hurried down the cold dewy path to the lake. All was new and hushed and strange as on the day of resurrection; and in the dark twilight of the garden alleys the statues stared at me like the shrouded dead.

In the salone, where the old Count’s portrait hung, I found the family assembled. Andrea and Gemma sat together, a little pinched, I thought, but decent and self-contained, like mourners who expect to inherit. Donna Marianna drooped near them, with something black over her head and her face dim with weeping. Roberto received me calmly and then turned to his sister.

“Go fetch my wife,” he said.

While she was gone there was silence. We could hear the cold drip of the garden-fountain and the patter of rats in the wall. Andrea and his wife stared out of window and Roberto sat in his father’s carved seat at the head of the long table. Then the door opened and Faustina entered.

When I saw her I stopped breathing. She seemed no more than the shell of herself, a hollow thing that grief has voided. Her eyes returned our images like polished agate, but conveyed to her no sense of our presence. Marianna led her to a seat, and she crossed her hands and nailed her dull gaze on Roberto. I looked from one to another, and in that spectral light it seemed to me that we were all souls come to judgment and naked to each other as to God. As to my own wrongdoing, it weighed on me no more than dust. The only feeling I had room for was fear—a fear that seemed to fill my throat and lungs and bubble coldly over my drowning head.

Suddenly Roberto began to speak. His voice was clear and steady, and I clutched at his words to drag myself above the surface of my terror. He touched on the charge that had been made against his wife—he did not say by whom—the foul rumor that had made itself heard on the eve of their first parting. Duty, he said, had sent him a double summons; to fight for his country and for his wife. He must clear his wife’s name before he was worthy to draw sword for Italy. There was no time to tame the slander before throttling it; he had to take the shortest way to its throat. At this point he looked at me and my soul shook. Then he turned to Andrea and Gemma.

“When you came to me with this rumor,” he said quietly, “you agreed to consider the family honor satisfied if I could induce Don Egidio to let me take his place and overhear my wife’s confession, and if that confession convinced me of her innocence. Was this the understanding?”

Andrea muttered something and Gemma tapped a sullen foot.

“After you had left,” Roberto continued, “I laid the case before Don Egidio and threw myself on his mercy.” He looked at me fixedly. “So strong was his faith in my wife’s innocence that for her sake he agreed to violate the sanctity of the confessional. I took his place.”

Marianna sobbed and crossed herself and a strange look flitted over Faustina’s face.

There was a moment’s pause; then Roberto, rising, walked across the room to his wife and took her by the hand.

“Your seat is beside me, Countess Siviano,” he said, and led her to the empty chair by his own.

Gemma started to her feet, but her husband pulled her down again.

“Jesus! Mary!” We heard Donna Marianna moan.

Roberto raised his wife’s hand to his lips. “You forgive me,” he said, “the means I took to defend you?” And turning to Andrea he added slowly: “I declare my wife innocent and my honor satisfied. You swear to stand by my decision?”

What Andrea stammered out, what hissing serpents of speech Gemma’s clinched teeth bit back, I never knew—for my eyes were on Faustina, and her face was a wonder to behold.

She had let herself be led across the room like a blind woman, and had listened without change of feature to her husband’s first words; but as he ceased her frozen gaze broke and her whole body seemed to melt against his breast. He put his arm out, but she slipped to his feet and Marianna hastened forward to raise her up. At that moment we heard the stroke of oars across the quiet water and saw the Count’s boat touch the landing-steps. Four strong oarsmen from Monte Isola were to row him down to Iseo, to take horse for Milan, and his servant, knapsack on shoulder, knocked warningly at the terrace window.

“No time to lose, excellency!” he cried.

Roberto turned and gripped my hand. “Pray for me,” he said low; and with a brief gesture to the others ran down the terrace to the boat.

Marianna was bathing Faustina with happy tears.

“Look up, dear! Think how soon he will come back! And there is the sunrise—see!”

Andrea and Gemma had slunk away like ghosts at cockcrow, and a red dawn stood over Milan.

*

If that sun rose red it set scarlet. It was the first of the Five Days in Milan—the Five Glorious Days, as they are called. Roberto reached the city just before the gates closed. So much we knew—little more. We heard of him in the Broletto (whence he must have escaped when the Austrians blew in the door) and in the Casa Vidiserti, with Casati, Cattaneo and the rest; but after the barricading began we could trace him only as having been seen here and there in the thick of the fighting, or tending the wounded under Bertani’s orders. His place, one would have said, was in the council-chamber, with the soberer heads; but that was an hour when every man gave his blood where it was most needed, and Cernuschi, Dandolo, Anfossi, della Porta fought shoulder to shoulder with students, artisans and peasants. Certain it is that he was seen on the fifth day; for among the volunteers who swarmed after Manara in his assault on the Porta Tosa was a servant of palazzo Siviano; and this fellow swore he had seen his master charge with Manara in the last assault—had watched him, sword in hand, press close to the gates, and then, as they swung open before the victorious dash of our men, had seen him drop and disappear in the inrushing tide of peasants that almost swept the little company off its feet. After that we heard nothing. There was savage work in Milan in those days, and more than one well-known figure lay lost among the heaps of dead hacked and disfeatured by Croat blades.

At the villa, we waited breathless. News came to us hour by hour: the very wind seemed to carry it, and it was swept to us on the incessant rush of the rain. On the twenty-third Radetsky had fled from Milan, to face Venice rising in his path. On the twenty-fourth the first Piedmontese had crossed the Ticino, and Charles Albert himself was in Pavia on the twenty-ninth. The bells of Milan had carried the word from Turin to Naples, from Genoa to Ancona, and the whole country was pouring like a flood-tide into Lombardy. Heroes sprang up from the bloody soil as thick as wheat after rain, and every day carried some new name to us; but never the one for which we prayed and waited. Weeks passed. We heard of Pastrengo, Goito, Rivoli; of Radetsky hemmed into the Quadrilateral, and our troops closing in on him from Rome, Tuscany and Venetia. Months passed—and we heard of Custozza. We saw Charles Albert’s broken forces flung back from the Mincio to the Oglio, from the Oglio to the Adda. We followed the dreadful retreat from Milan, and saw our rescuers dispersed like dust before the wind. But all the while no word came to us of Roberto.

These were dark days in Lombardy; and nowhere darker than in the old villa on Iseo. In September Donna Marianna and the young Countess put on black, and Count Andrea and his wife followed their example. In October the Countess gave birth to a daughter. Count Andrea then took possession of the palazzo Siviano, and the two women remained at the villa. I have no heart to tell you of the days that followed. Donna Marianna wept and prayed incessantly, and it was long before the baby could snatch a smile from her. As for the Countess Faustina, she went among us like one of the statues in the garden. The child had a wet-nurse from the village, and it was small wonder there was no milk for it in that marble breast. I spent much of my time at the villa, comforting Donna Marianna as best I could; but sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when we three sat in the dimly-lit salone, with the old Count’s portrait overhead, and I looked up and saw the Countess Faustina in the tall carved seat beside her husband’s empty chair, my spine grew chill and I felt a cold wind in my hair.

The end of it was that in the spring I went to see my bishop and laid my sin before him. He was a saintly and merciful old man, and gave me a patient hearing.

“You believed the lady innocent?” he asked when I had ended.

“Monsignore, on my soul!”

“You thought to avert a great calamity from the house to which you owed more than your life?”

“It was my only thought.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Go home, my son. You shall learn my decision.”

Three months later I was ordered to resign my living and go to America, where a priest was needed for the Italian mission church in New York. I packed my possessions and set sail from Genoa. I knew no more of America than any peasant up in the hills. I fully expected to be speared by naked savages on landing; and for the first few months after my arrival I wished at least once a day that such a blessed fate had befallen me. But it is no part of my story to tell you what I suffered in those early days. The Church had dealt with me mercifully, as is her wont, and her punishment fell far below my deserts….

I had been some four years in New York, and no longer thought of looking back from the plough, when one day word was brought me that an Italian professor lay ill and had asked for a priest. There were many Italian refugees in New York at that time, and the greater number, being well-educated men, earned a living by teaching their language, which was then included among the accomplishments of fashionable New York. The messenger led me to a poor boarding-house and up to a small bare room on the top floor. On the visiting-card nailed to the door I read the name “De Roberti, Professor of Italian.” Inside, a gray-haired haggard man tossed on the narrow bed. He turned a glazed eye on me as I entered, and I recognized Roberto Siviano.

I steadied myself against the doorpost and stood staring at him without a word.

“What’s the matter?” asked the doctor who was bending over the bed. I stammered that the sick man was an old friend.

“He wouldn’t know his oldest friend just now,” said the doctor. “The fever’s on him; but it will go down toward sunset.”

I sat down at the head of the bed and took Roberto’s hand in mine.

“Is he going to die?” I asked.

“I don’t believe so; but he wants nursing.”

“I will nurse him.”

The doctor nodded and went out. I sat in the little room, with Roberto’s burning hand in mine. Gradually his skin cooled, the fingers grew quiet, and the flush faded from his sallow cheekbones. Toward dusk he looked up at me and smiled.

“Egidio,” he said quietly.

I administered the sacrament, which he received with the most fervent devotion; then he fell into a deep sleep.

During the weeks that followed I had no time to ask myself the meaning of it all. My one business was to keep him alive if I could. I fought the fever day and night, and at length it yielded. For the most part he raved or lay unconscious; but now and then he knew me for a moment, and whispered “Egidio” with a look of peace.

I had stolen many hours from my duties to nurse him; and as soon as the danger was past I had to go back to my parish work. Then it was that I began to ask myself what had brought him to America; but I dared not face the answer.

On the fourth day I snatched a moment from my work and climbed to his room. I found him sitting propped against his pillows, weak as a child but clear-eyed and quiet. I ran forward, but his look stopped me.

“Signor parocco,” he said, “the doctor tells me that I owe my life to your nursing, and I have to thank you for the kindness you have shown to a friendless stranger.”

“A stranger?” I gasped.

He looked at me steadily. “I am not aware that we have met before,” he said.

For a moment I thought the fever was on him; but a second glance convinced me that he was master of himself.

“Roberto!” I cried, trembling.

“You have the advantage of me,” he said civilly. “But my name is Roberti, not Roberto.”

The floor swam under me and I had to lean against the wall.

“You are not Count Roberto Siviano of Milan?”

“I am Tommaso de Roberti, professor of Italian, from Modena.”

“And you have never seen me before?”

“Never that I know of.”

“Were you never at Siviano, on the lake of Iseo?” I faltered.

He said calmly: “I am unacquainted with that part of Italy.”

My heart grew cold and I was silent.

“You mistook me for a friend, I suppose?” he added.

“Yes,” I cried, “I mistook you for a friend;” and with that I fell on my knees by his bed and cried like a child.

Suddenly I felt a touch on my shoulder. “Egidio,” said he in a broken voice, “look up.”

I raised my eyes, and there was his old smile above me, and we clung to each other without a word. Presently, however, he drew back, and put me quietly aside.

“Sit over there, Egidio. My bones are like water and I am not good for much talking yet.”

“Let us wait, Roberto. Sleep now—we can talk tomorrow.”

“No. What I have to say must be said at once.” He examined me thoughtfully. “You have a parish here in New York?”

I assented.

“And my work keeps me here. I have pupils. It is too late to make a change.”

“A change?”

He continued to look at me calmly. “It would be difficult for me,” he explained, “to find employment in a new place.”

“But why should you leave here?”

“I shall have to,” he returned deliberately, “if you persist in recognizing in me your former friend Count Siviano.”

“Roberto!”

He lifted his hand. “Egidio,” he said, “I am alone here, and without friends. The companionship, the sympathy of my parish priest would be a consolation in this strange city; but it must not be the companionship of the parocco of Siviano. You understand?”

“Roberto,” I cried, “it is too dreadful to understand!”

“Be a man, Egidio,” said he with a touch of impatience. “The choice lies with you, and you must make it now. If you are willing to ask no questions, to name no names, to make no allusions to the past, let us live as friends together, in God’s name! If not, as soon as my legs can carry me I must be off again. The world is wide, luckily—but why should we be parted?”

I was on my knees at his side in an instant. “We must never be parted!” I cried. “Do as you will with me. Give me your orders and I obey—have I not always obeyed you?”

I felt his hand close sharply on mine. “Egidio!” he admonished me.

“No—no—I shall remember. I shall say nothing—”

“Think nothing?”

“Think nothing,” I said with a last effort.

“God bless you!” he answered.

My son, for eight years I kept my word to him. We met daily almost, we ate and walked and talked together, we lived like David and Jonathan—but without so much as a glance at the past. How he had escaped from Milan—how he had reached New York—I never knew. We talked often of Italy’s liberation—as what Italians would not?—but never touched on his share in the work. Once only a word slipped from him; and that was when one day he asked me how it was that I had been sent to America. The blood rushed to my face, and before I could answer he had raised a silencing hand.

“I see,” he said; “it was your penance too.”

During the first years he had plenty of work to do, but he lived so frugally that I guessed he had some secret use for his earnings. It was easy to conjecture what it was. All over the world Italian exiles were toiling and saving to further the great cause. He had political friends in New York, and sometimes he went to other cities to attend meetings and make addresses. His zeal never slackened; and but for me he would often have gone hungry that some shivering patriot might dine. I was with him heart and soul, but I had the parish on my shoulders, and perhaps my long experience of men had made me a little less credulous than Christian charity requires; for I could have sworn that some of the heroes who hung on him had never had a whiff of Austrian blood, and would have fed out of the same trough with the white-coats if there had been polenta enough to go round. Happily my friend had no such doubts. He believed in the patriots as devoutly as in the cause; and if some of his hard-earned dollars travelled no farther than the nearest wine-cellar or cigar-shop, he never suspected the course they took.

His health was never the same after the fever; and by and by he began to lose his pupils, and the patriots cooled off as his pockets fell in. Toward the end I took him to live in my shabby attic. He had grown weak and had a troublesome cough, and he spent the greater part of his days indoors. Cruel days they must have been to him, but he made no sign, and always welcomed me with a cheerful word. When his pupils dropped off, and his health made it difficult for him to pick up work outside, he set up a letter-writer’s sign, and used to earn a few pennies by serving as amanuensis to my poor parishioners; but it went against him to take their money, and half the time he did the work for nothing. I knew it was hard for him to live on charity, as he called it, and I used to find what jobs I could for him among my friends the negozianti, who would send him letters to copy, accounts to make up and what not; but we were all poor together, and the master had licked the platter before the dog got it.

So lived that just man, my son; and so, after eight years of exile, he died one day in my arms. God had let him live long enough to see Solferino and Villa-franca; and was perhaps never more merciful than in sparing him Monte Rotondo and Mentana. But these are things of which it does not become me to speak. The new Italy does not wear the face of our visions; but it is written that God shall know His own, and it cannot be that He shall misread the hearts of those who dreamed of fashioning her in His image.

As for my friend, he is at peace, I doubt not; and his just life and holy death intercede for me, who sinned for his sake alone.