Читать книгу Time's Door - Esther Meynell - Страница 5

That had happened some years before he was ten. The story had dwelt in his mind, continuously present and cherished, ever since, the impression of it greatly deepened by portions of the Letters which he had persuaded his mother to read to him, though in spite of his beseechings she would not yield the Letters into his hands. This very withholding made them the more precious to his eyes, and the thought of them and all they told and stood for, made a deep and definite mark upon his childhood, moulding it to destined shapes.

His nature had two distinct sides to it—the quick maturity and passionate eagerness of his Italian father, the sentiment and tendency to melancholy of his German mother, who had never become completely reconciled to her Italian exile. Giovanni her only child, who to outward seeming was almost purely Italian, had been her consolation and link with her adopted country. But her heart continually turned backward to German scenes—it was German poetry she read to her son, the German tongue she taught and spoke with him, German music she sang and played for his delectation. So Giovanni had two countries—the Italy where he was born, born too in Rome, the very heart and centre of that Italy, pervaded in his early years by the enchanting, exciting, and spasmodic presence of his father, who seemed to flash across the scene in torrents of brilliant music, talk like fireworks, caresses, sweetmeats. His other country was a still, fairy Germany that was the creation of his mother, a place entirely of dreams—he had never set foot there.

He delighted in his actual, vivid life, it filled his day with complete satisfaction. But when he lay in his bed at night then another country and another life stole into his mind, he held sleep at bay as long as his heavy eyelids would permit each night so that he might walk there. It was a curious country, or would have seemed so to anyone of mature and sensible mind. Even his mother, though fortunately her mind was not too sensible, would have been a little surprised had she realised exactly into what a tangled garden her tales had flowered. Princesses with swinging ropes of hair resided there, and dwarfs, and animals whose fur was but a cloak of disguise, and fair but dangerous maidens whose home was water and whose tresses flowed like streams. Mingling strangely with these beings of mythology and fairy tale were musicians—crowds of musicians attired in curled wigs, with velvet coats and ruffles and a beautiful courtliness of manner (except one who was not courtly at all, but wild, and like a great driving storm), musicians from whose hands poured marvellous floods of melody, sweeping the small Giovanni entirely out of this world. This stream of melody was always to him the most vivid of all these experiences. And there were musical instruments too: violins, and harpsichords slender and stiff, and great organs that climbed with immense gilded pipes and fluted ornament and carved Cherubin and Seraphin blowing trumpets towards soaring church roofs. It was a glorious country, that of his mother, full of magic tales and music.

When the girl who became his mother had married the Italian violinist Luigi Cavatini, she had brought her magic tales with her and kept them childishly in her heart in the new world opened to her by marriage—a world still filled with music, but holding other and more difficult elements.

Gerda Eisner was the youngest of three daughters—theGERMAN MAIDEN youngest, the most beautiful, cherished and adored not only by her parents, but by her two elder sisters, who both married early and with complete suitability and became the satisfied mothers of large families. But even with the cares of their own offspring upon them, they both, Elsa and Margreta, still kept a loving eye upon Gerda, more as though she were child instead of sister. When the mother of the three of them died this care became of an even greater necessity. Gerda was sixteen at the time of her mother’s death, and like most German maidens perfectly competent in kitchen and household, even though she had been known to keep a poetry book as well as a cook-book in the kitchen drawer. She could not see that the pot boiled any the less satisfactorily if one read a lyric while waiting for it. “But no, Liebschen,” Elsa would say, taking the book from her hands, with a little kiss on the cheek flushed from the stove, “The pot boils over while you read your poetry, and then where are you?”

Gerda did not regard that calamity as irremediable, but she submitted without protest to her sister’s gentle domination. Frau Elsa and Frau Margreta continually congratulated themselves that their own abodes were within such easy reach of their father’s house that one or other of them could constantly run in to guide the child. They chose her dresses for her, they brushed her hair, and when the time came they wound the pale silvery plaits round her little head—hair that as Margreta said, as the strands slipped through her fingers, was “like a cornfield by moonlight.” They chaperoned her proudly to her parties, and they began to look about their circle for a husband for Gerda as safe and suitable as their own.

But Gerda, surprisingly, took this matter into her own control. She who had been so gentle and malleable, so fearful of in any way crossing what her wise elder sisters thought right, took this tremendous step quite alone—“Well, practically alone,” as Elsa said, “for of course we all know the kleine Papa is as good as nobody!” No disrespect was intended, it was simply a fact that the Herr Professor—outside the class-room where he dealt with the mysteries of counterpoint and composition—was no use at all. It was almost necessary to put the food into his mouth. And of course in a foreign country—oh, why, sighed the two sisters in a melancholy chorus, did we ever consent that Gerda should go with Papa?

But she had gone, it was too late, the thing hadROMAN ROMANCE happened. The Herr Professor, at the close of an exhausting season’s work, had decided that he would take a holiday and that his Gerda should accompany him. They would go far from Leipzig, they would cross the Alps, they would go to Italy, to Rome. Professor Eisner had been corresponding for some time with that famous Italian teacher of counterpoint, Signor Carlo Antonelli, who was at that time engaged upon a critical edition of the works of Arcangelo Correlli in which the Professor was deeply interested, and he felt that personal intercourse would yield very satisfactory results on several controversial points. It was two decades since he had been to Italy, and it would be a delicious experience to show some of the treasures of that land to Gerda.

So Gerda had found herself in Rome, and in Rome, where her father was received with enthusiasm into all the musical society of the City, she met Luigi Cavatini. To Cavatini Gerda appeared like a dream come visible, with her pale shining hair, her innocent eyes, her sweet singing voice, the gentleness of her manner. Gerda felt as if all the heroes of romance had yielded their perfections to the brilliant creature, all grace, fire, dazzling teeth in the olive-skinned face, eyes that held flashing lights in their dark depths, a manner, an air of conquest, calculated to disturb the equilibrium of a heart far more experienced than was hers. He was as different from the Saxon young men of her brief acquaintance as is wine from milk. Add to this his superb gifts as a violinist, the way in which, with his chin tucked down on a bit of varnished wood, the slender bow vibrating in his long fingers, his smouldering passionate eyes searching and holding Gerda’s, he would pour his music straight into her shaken bosom. She was as a bird in the net of the fowler, as helplessly his.

When, after a few flying weeks, Cavatini asked her hand in marriage her father, though with an uneasy feeling that it was terribly precipitate and that his elder daughters might not approve, was altogether too unworldly to withhold his consent from a pair of lovers so ideally romantic. The sight of them together stirred tender memories in his heart—and remoter dreams that had never been fulfilled. Luigi’s brilliant musicianship broke down one inhibition, and Gerda’s tears, smiles, trembling and fated joy, another.

And Rome, in the spring, so fair, so lifted out of the common day, made it impossible to consider the dullness of discretions—of what less intoxicated minds might be thinking beyond the Alps. Gerda’s own impression of that time was a moving enchanting kaleidoscope of light, of large golden moons and stars that seemed almost as large, flowers, sweetness, music, of Luigi’s magic bow which swayed the pulses of her heart as it swayed the fiddle strings. She knew hardly more of where she actually was than if she had been transported to the shining moon which rose so magically over the mistiness of the Campagna. She could hardly have been said to have returned to earth till her marriage was more than a month old, and she found herself saying farewell to her father, who was returning to Germany. For the first time she realised that she must be left behind in Italy, the country which was now hers. She had not fully understood that marrying LuigiCHILD OF ROME made her an Italian woman. The thought frightened her—it was like being plucked up by the roots and told to grow afresh. Difficult adjustments she had to make, and her roses discovered their thorns, but when the small Giovanni appeared upon the scene there was no shadow on that joy—Rome in all its tremendous history had seen no such child before. As she lay in her bed gazing at the little downy head she heard the Roman bells ringing—from her high window she had a view of a slender Campanile, pale against the deep blue of the sky, and round it circled flights of white doves, their outspread wings dazzling in the radiant air.

Gerda was reconciled to Italy.