Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “I have been in Florence less than an hour.”

  Her hand was in his, her lips were parted in a pleased smile, but as he came into the light of the wide window, he saw her expression change suddenly to a look of grieved surprise. He knew only too well what that look meant, though she gave no utterance to her thoughts. A year ago his friends frequently told him that he looked ill — ; but of late no one had told him so. He had only read in their faces the evil augury which they saw in his face.

  “I have come upon a festive occasion,” he said, glancing round at the crowd.

  “Oh, it is only my afternoon at home. People are so sociable in Florence. I have more people than usual to-day, because I let my friends know that Signor Amaldi had promised to sing. May I introduce him to you? No doubt you heard of him in London the season before last. He makes a sensation wherever he goes.”

  She beckoned to a small gentleman with fiery black eyes, and a large moustache, who lolled against the gaily draped piano, the centre of an admiring group, and the introduction was made.

  Gerard knew enough Italian to compliment the singer in his own language without any grave offences against grammatical laws, and Signor Amaldi replied effusively, protesting that his musical gifts were poor things, mere wayside weeds, which he delighted to cast under the feet of the most gracious of English ladies.

  Anon the piano was taken prisoner by a cadaverous German, with tawny hair, as closely cropped as if he were a fugitive from Portland, and this gentleman expounded Chopin for the next half hour, amidst general inattention. The two English footmen were handing tea and chocolate, the women were whispering together in corners, and from an adjoining room came the tinkling of silver and glass at a liberally supplied buffet, at which a good many of the guests had congregated. But still those Hungarian war cries, those funereal wailings, shrieked and crashed, sobbed and sighed from the hard-ridden piano, while the German played on for his own pleasure and contentment, flinging up head and hands now and then in a sudden rapture during a bar of silence, and then swooping down upon the black notes like a bird of prey, and firing a volley of minor chords that startled the chatterers at the buffet and the whisperers in the corners of the salon.

  During this musical interlude Edith and Gerard had time for a confidential talk.

  “I hardly expected to find you so gay,” he said.

  “Surely you don’t call this gaiety — a little music and a few pleasant people who have taken pity upon my solitude, and forced their acquaintance upon me. Florence is a gloomy place if one does not know people. There is so little to do after one has exhausted the galleries, and taken the three or four excursions which are de rigueur. But now you and the spring have come we can take all the old excursions together, bask in the sunshine at Fiesole and buy perfumery from the dear old monks at the Certosa. I am so glad you have come.”

  “And yet you commanded me not to come until your year of mourning was ended. You refused to abate a single week.”

  “One is glad sometimes to have one’s commands disobeyed. But tell me what made you come. Why did you disobey?”

  “Because my yearning for you was stronger than my obedience. I was utterly miserable, and I longed to see you.”

  “I am afraid you have been neglecting your health while I have been away,” she said, looking at him earnestly.

  “I have been ailing — but I am well now that I am with you. I look to you and Italy for healing. I have bought a yacht, and I am going to carry you off in it, as soon as the days are fair and long.”

  “That will not be till June, when my year of widowhood will be over.”

  “I am not going to wait for June. I am not going to wait for May. I snap my fingers at Mrs. Grundy. If you can give tea-parties you can marry me. My days of submission and waiting are over.”

  She laughed, and laid her baud gently upon his for a moment, and looked at him, and then sighed, while her eyes filled with sudden teal’s. She rose hurriedly and went away to talk to people who were leaving, and for the next quarter of an hour she was standing near the door bidding her friends good-bye.

  Gerard moved about the rooms restlessly, but discovered no one whom he knew. He saw people looking at him with that quick furtive air in which good breeding struggle with curiosity. Suddenly he found himself in front of a large looking-glass, and saw himself from head to foot in the foreground of a group of well-dressed people, the women elegant and graceful, the men trim and well set-up.

  How ghastly he looked, with his cadaverous cheeks and sunken eyes, doubtless a natural result of that wild week at Monte Carlo! How shabby, too, he to whom tailors’ bills were of no consequence, he who in the days of his poverty had been the monitor of other young men, distinguished for the sober perfection of his toilet. Now, with his clothes hanging slackly upon his wasted frame, with the dust of travel still upon him, he looked an ugly blot upon the splendid elegance of Mrs. Champion’s drawing-room. He went away hurriedly, slipping out by the dining-room door, unseen by Edith. He meant to have stayed and talked with her when the guests were gone, but a sudden disgust at life and at himself seized him as he contemplated his face and figure in the tall Venetian glass; and the thought of a tête-à-tête with his sweetheart was no longer pleasant to him.

  He was with her next morning, before luncheon, and on this occasion the glass reflected at least a well-dressed man. He had taken particular pains with his toilet, and the pale grey complet and white silk tie had all the cool freshness of spring, while from the chief florist’s in the Via Tornabuoni he carried a large nosegay of lilies of the valley and niphetos roses, as tribute to his mistress.

  She welcomed him delightedly, and complimented him upon his improved appearance.

  “You were really looking ill yesterday,” she said; “a long dusty railway journey is so exhausting. This morning you have renewed your youth.”

  “And I mean to keep young, if I can. Am I over bold if I invite myself to your dejeuner?”

  “I should think you very foolish if you waited for me to invite you. Come as often and as much as you can. Your knife and fork shall be laid for every meal. My sheep-dog will be on duty again this afternoon. She has been at Siena with some clerical friends, who insisted upon carrying her off to help them with her French and Italian — both of which, by the way, are odious.”

  “Are sheep-dogs wanted in Florence? I have been taught to think that Florentine society asks no questions.”

  “That shows your insular ignorance. Good society in Florence is like good society everywhere else.”

  “I understand. Severe virtue, tempered by Russian Princesses and their cavuliere servente”

  They lunched tête-à-tête, under the protecting eyes of the major-domo and the two British footmen, in funereal liveries and powdered hair. There was no opportunity for confidential talk, nor did Gerard desire anything better than this light, airy gossip about people they knew, and the ways and works of their own particular world, at home and on the Continent, from Royalties downwards. He enjoyed this light talk. It seemed to him that he had left passion, with its accompaniment of sorrow, on the shores of the Thames. To sit by the wood fire in Mrs. Champion’s salon, playing with her Russian poodle, or turning over the newest French and German books, or peeping into the dainty little vellum-bound Florentine classics on the book-table, while the lady sat by the window and embroidered flame-coloured azalias on a ground of sea-green satin, sufficed him. He felt restful, and almost happy. He was as much at ease with his fiancée as if they were old married people. He told her of his yacht, and all its luxuries and modem improvements. He talked of those sunny Greek isles which they were to visit together.

  “I hope you will order some Greek gowns in your trousseau,” he said; “I shall want you to dress like Sappho or Lesbia when we are at Cyprus or Corfu.”

  “I will wear anything you like, but I think a neat tailor gown made of white serge would be smarter and more shipshape than chiton or peplum.”

  The long a
fternoon was delightful to Gerard, and in spite of occasional anxious glances at her lover’s face, Mrs. Champion seemed happy. It was pleasant to talk of that summer tour in the Greek Archipelago and the Golden Horn — how they were to go to this place or that to avoid undue heat; how they were to bask in the sun so long as his rays were agreeable; and how, before the days shortened again, they were to decide whether they would winter in Algiers or in Egypt, or whether it might not please them to travel further afield, to Ceylon, for instance, and that strange, gorgeous, antique world of Hindostan. There was all the restful consciousness of wealth underlying these day-dreams, the knowledge that the cost of things could make no difference.

  Mrs. Gresham came buzzing in at tea-time, and after having endured her chatter about the Cathedral, the mosaics, the pictures, and the table d’hôte at Siena — including the wonder of wonders in having met Mrs. Rawdon Smith, of Chelmsford, and her daughter — for nearly an hour, Gerard took his leave, promising to return next day to luncheon, and to drive to Fiesole with Mrs. Champion and her cousin in the afternoon, provided the sun shone, which it had not done since his arrival in Florence.

  He went back to his hotel, and dined in the solitude of a spacious salon overlooking the river and the Piazza. The candles were lighted within, clusters of candles in two tall candelabra, which brightened the table, but left the angles of the room in shadow. Outside the three large windows the evening was pale and grey, and in that soft greyness the lights on the old bridge and all along the quays shone golden.

  Gerard, who was seldom able to eat alone, left his meal and went over to one of the windows. He opened the casement, and stood looking out over the marble bridge, and the rushing weir, and listening to the evening sounds of Florence, with his elbows resting on the red velvet cushion which covered the sill. First came the tattoo, and the sound of soldiers marching in the piazza, the trumpet-call repeated and then dying away in the distance; and then the sonorous bell of the church of All Saints filled the air, calling the faithful to an evening service. It was Holy Week, and there were services daily and nightly in the church yonder — lighted altars, tapers innumerable, throngs of worshippers.

  The bell ceased after a while; and there was no sound but the water rushing over the weir, or occasional footsteps across the empty square. Then the bell pealed out again, slow, solemn, funereal, and from a cloister beside the church issued the funeral train in all its Florentine awfulness — hooded monks, flaming torches, darkly shrouded bier. Gerard shut the casement with angry suddenness, and went back to the deserted dinner-table. He had dismissed all service. The wine flasks and untasted desert alone remained in the light of the clustering candles.

  The solitude within, the, dismal tolling of the bell without, the heavy colouring of the dimly lighted room, weighed upon his spirits. He took up his hat and went out. The streets would be infinitely more agreeable than that spacious emptiness within four walls.

  The streets looked gay and bright in spite of Holy Week. Lighted shop windows, people passing to and fro; far better this than the shadows of an empty room. There was neither opera nor theatre open, or he would have sought distraction of that kind. Great flaming posters announced various performances of the lowest music-hall type, and strictly British. From these he recoiled. He passed the lighted portico of a fashionable club, but did not test its hospitality. He turned out of a broad street into a narrow one — a short cut to the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. A flare of yellow light filled the further end of the street. Something festal doubtless in defiance of Lent.

  No, not festal. Again the black cowls, the flaming torches, the darkly shrouded bier, and suddenly from Santa Maria yonder the slow and solemn bell. He turned on his heel, retraced his steps quickly, emerged into the bright broad street he had just left, only to meet another procession. Again the cowls, the torches, and the bier.

  Florence was alive with funerals. There was nothing doing in the city, it seemed to him, but the burial of the dead. These funerals creeping through the night, mysterious under that uncertain flare of the torches, made death more awful. He hurried away towards the river, overtook an empty fly, and told the man to drive him to Mrs. Champion’s villa, as last as a Florentine horse would go. He felt a need of human companionship, of a warm, loving heart beating against his own, his own which seemed cold and dead as the hearts of those quiet sleepers who were being carried through the streets to-night.

  “I am not fit to be alone,” he told himself, as the light vehicle rattled over the bridge to the Porta Romana. “I am full of vague apprehensions, like a child that has been frightened by his nurse. What is that strange fear of children, I wonder, that innate horror of something unexplained, indescribable? What but the hereditary dread of death, the infinite horror handed down from generation to generation, a fear which precedes knowledge, an instinct which antedates sense. In spite of Locke and all his school, there is one innate idea, if only one, and that is the fear of death. The wolf, the bear, the black man of the nurse’s story, are all different images of that one unthinkable form.”

  He was ashamed of his own weakness, which had been so shaken by the passing of funerals in which he had no interest; but that tolling bell and those cowled monks had filled him with gloomy fancies. He thought of the plague-stricken city of the fourteenth century, and how Death held his court here while a few miles away in the garden in Doccia’s dell light-hearted ladies listened to stories that have become part and parcel of the world’s poesy, and then the song which he had heard yesterday in Mrs. Champion’s drawing-room recurred to him —

  “‘Vorrei morir’ quando tramonta il sole,

  Quando sui prato dormon le viole,

  Lieta farebbe a Dio l’alma ritorno,

  A primavera e sui morir del giorno.”

  Alas, and alas! would death be any sweeter to him because of a lovely sunset, or a woodland starred with primroses and banks purple with sweet-scented violets? What to him was spring or winter if he must die? Whether his last breath went forth on the wings of the storm, like Cromwell’s and Napoleon’s, or whether his fading eyes turned their last look upon the placid loveliness of a summer evening in a pastoral country, could matter nothing to him. Death meant the end — and death was unspeakably cruel.

  Mrs. Champion and her cousin were sauntering in the garden after dinner, in the light of the Easter moon, very tired of each other’s society, and even of the garden. Every life has these dim evening hours, when there seems to be nothing to live for.

  “How good of you!” cried Edith, recognising her lover in the moonlight.

  There was a fountain in a shallow marble basin sending up its waters from the shadow of surrounding foliage into the silvery light, and near the fountain a broad marble bench with crimson cushions spread upon it, where Mrs. Champion was wont to sit. She seated herself on this bench to-night, and, after a few words of commonplace, Gerard took his place at her side, while Mrs. Gresham discreetly returned to the drawing-room, the poodle, and a Tauchnitz novel.

  “You did not expect to see me so soon again, did you, Edith?”

  “I did not expect — no — but I am so much the more glad.”

  “I could not live without you. I felt an aching wish to be with some one who loves me — to feel that I have still some hold upon warm human life.”

  And then he told her about the three funerals in the streets of Florence.

  “Is it often so?” he asked. “Does Florence swarm with funerals?”

  “My dear Gerard,” she exclaimed laughingly. “Three! For a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants! Does that mean much? It is only the torchlight and the Brothers of the Misericordia that impressed you. How superior to anything one sees in England! So mediæval! so paintable! But don’t let us talk of funerals.”

  “No, indeed! I am here to talk of something widely different. I want to talk of a wedding — our wedding, Edith. When is it to be?”

  “Next June, if you like,” she answered quietly.

  “But
I do not like. June is ages away. Who knows if we may live to June. The monks may be carrying us through the dark narrow streets in the flare of their torches before June. I want you to marry me to-morrow—”

  “Gerard, in Holy Week!”

  “What do I care for Holy Week? But if you care, let us be married on Easter Monday. We can start for Spezia after the ceremony, and dine on board my yacht, in the loveliest harbour in Europe. We can watch yonder moon shining on the ghostly whiteness of the Carrara mountains, whiter, more picturesque, than those snow-peaked Apennines.” —

  “So soon!”

  “And why not soon?” he urged impatiently. “Edith, have I not waited long enough? Did I not consume my soul in three long years of waiting? Have I not wasted the best years of my youth in silken dalliance, and frittered away any talents I ever possessed upon the idlest of love-letters, in which I was forbidden to talk of love? Edith, I have been your slave — give me something for my service before it is too late!”

  “You are such a despondent lover,” she said, with a forced laugh. “Despondent, no; but I feel the need of your love. I feel that I am isolated, that I cannot live without some stronger nature than my own to lean upon, and that your character can supply all that is wanting in mine. We ought to be happy, Edith. We have youth, wealth, freedom, all the elements of happiness.”

  “Yes,” she answered, with a faint sigh, “we ought to be happy.”

  “Let it be Monday, then. I will arrange all details.”

  “Easter Monday! What a vulgar day for a wedding!”

  “Is it vulgar? No matter, our marriage will be performed so quietly that hardly any one will know anything about it till they see the announcement in the Times.”

  “Well, it must be as you like. You have been very good and devoted to me in all these years, and I don’t think I shall be wanting in respect to my poor James, if I consent to marry you in April instead of June, though I dare say my sisters and people will talk. And as for my trousseau, I have plenty of gowns that will do well enough for your yacht. You must take me to Palestine, Gerard. I have always longed to see the Holy Land.”