Then began a new life—a life so active and healthy, so steeped in fresh air and sunshine, that we sometimes marvelled how we could have endured the gloom of the Black Country. We were constantly up and down the line—now at Genoa, now at Turin, taking trial trips with the locomotives, and placing our old experience at the service of our new employers.
In the meanwhile we made Genoa our headquarters, and hired a couple of rooms over a small shop in a by-street sloping down to the quays. Such a busy little street—so steep and winding that no vehicles could pass through it, and so narrow that the sky looked like a mere strip of deep blue ribbon overhead! Every house in it, however, was a shop where the goods encroached on the footway, or were piled about the door, or hung like tapestry from the balconies; and all day long, from dawn till dusk, an incessant stream of passers-by poured up and down between the port and the upper quarter of the city.
Our landlady was the widow of a silver-worker, and lived by the sale of filigree ornaments, cheap jewellery, combs, fans, and toys in ivory and jet. She had an only daughter, named Gianetta, who served in the shop and was simply the most beautiful woman I ever beheld. Looking back across this weary chasm of years, and bringing her image before me (as I can and do) with all the vividness of life, I am unable, even now, to detect a flaw in her beauty. I do not attempt to describe her. I do not believe there is a poet living who could find the words to do it; but I once saw a picture that was somewhat like her (not half so lovely, but still like her), and for aught I know, that picture is still hanging where I last looked at it—upon the walls of the Louvre.
It represented a woman with brown eyes and golden hair, looking over her shoulder into a circular mirror held by a bearded man in the background. In this man, as I then understood, the artist had painted his own portrait; in her, the portrait of the woman he loved. No picture that I ever saw was half so beautiful, and yet it was not worthy to be named in the same breath with Gianetta Coneglia.
You may be certain the widow’s shop did not want for customers. All Genoa knew how fair a face was to be seen behind that dingy little counter; and Gianetta, flirt as she was, had more lovers than she cared to remember, even by name. Gentle and simple, rich and poor, from the red-capped sailor buying his earrings or his amulet, to the nobleman carelessly purchasing half the filigrees in the window, she treated them all alike—encouraged them, laughed at them, led them on and turned them off at her pleasure. She had no more heart than a marble statue; as Mat and I discovered by-and-by, to our bitter cost.
I cannot tell to this day how it came about, or what first led me to suspect how things were going with us both; but long before the waning of that autumn a coldness had sprung up between my friend and myself. It was nothing that could have been put into words. It was nothing that either of us could have explained or justified, to save his life. We lodged together, ate together, worked together, exactly as before; we even took our long evening’s walk together, when the day’s labour was ended; and except, perhaps, that we were more silent than of old, no mere looker-on could have detected a shadow of change. Yet there it was, silent and subtle, widening the gulf between us every day.
It was not his fault. He was too true and gentle-hearted to have willingly brought about such a state of things between us. Neither do I believe—fiery as my nature is—that it was mine. It was all hers—hers from first to last—the sin, and the shame, and the sorrow.
If she had shown a fair and open preference for either of us, no real harm could have come of it. I would have put any constraint upon myself, and heaven knows! have borne any suffering, to see Mat really happy. I know that he would have done the same, and more if he could, for me. But Gianetta cared not one bajocco for either. She never meant to choose between us.
It gratified her vanity to divide us; it amused her to play with us. It would pass my power to tell how, by a thousand imperceptible shades of coquetry—by the lingering of a glance, the substitution of a word, the flitting of a smile—she contrived to turn our heads, and torture our hearts, and lead us on to love her. She deceived us both. She buoyed us both up with hope; she maddened us with jealousy; she crushed us with despair. For my part, when I seemed now and then to wake to a sudden sense of the ruin that was about our path, and saw how the truest friendship that ever bound two lives together was drifting on to wreck and ruin, I asked myself whether any woman in the world was worth what Mat had been to me and I to him. But this was not often. I was readier to shut my eyes upon the truth than to face it; and so lived on, wilfully, in a dream.
Thus the autumn passed away, and winter came—the strange, treacherous Genoese winter, green with olive and ilex, brilliant with sunshine, and bitter with storm. Still, rivals at heart and friends on the surface, Mat and I lingered on in our lodging in the Vicolo Balba. Still, Gianetta held us with her fatal wiles and her still more fatal beauty. At length there came a day when I felt I could bear the horrible misery and suspense of it no longer. The sun, I vowed, should not go down before I knew my sentence. She must choose between us. She must either take me or let me go. I was reckless. I was desperate. I was determined to know the worst or the best. If the worst, I would at once turn my back upon Genoa, upon her, upon all the pursuits and purposes of my past life, and begin the world anew. This I told her, passionately and sternly, standing before her in the little parlour at the back of the shop, one bleak December morning.
‘If it’s Mat whom you care for most,’ I said, ‘tell me so in one word, and I will never trouble you again. He is better worth your love. I am jealous and exacting; he is as trusting and unselfish as a woman. Speak, Gianetta; am I to bid you goodbye for ever and ever, or am I to write home to my mother in England, bidding her pray to God to bless the woman who has promised to be my wife?’
‘You plead your friend’s cause well,’ she replied haughtily. ‘Matteo ought to be grateful. This is more than he ever did for you.’
‘Give me an answer, for pity’s sake,’ I exclaimed, ‘and let me go!’
‘You are free to go or stay, Signor Inglese,’ she replied, ‘I am not your gaoler.’
‘Do you bid me leave you?’
‘Beata Madre! not I.’
‘Will you marry me, if I stay?’
She laughed aloud—such a merry, mocking, musical laugh, like a chime of silver bells!
‘You ask too much,’ she said.
‘Only what you have led me to hope these five or six months past.’
‘That is just what Matteo says. How tiresome you both are!’
‘Oh, Gianetta,’ I said, passionately, ‘be serious for one moment! I am a rough fellow, it is true—not half good enough or clever enough for you; but I love you with my whole heart, and an emperor could do no more.’
‘I am glad of it,’ she replied; ‘I do not want you to love me less.’
‘Than you cannot wish to make me wretched! Will you promise me?’
‘I promise nothing,’ said she, with another burst of laughter; ‘except that I will not marry Matteo!’
Except that she would not marry Matteo! Only that. Not a word of hope for myself. Nothing but my friend’s condemnation. I might get comfort, and selfish triumph, and some sort of base assurance out of that, if I could. And so, to my shame, I did. I grasped at the vain encouragement, and, fool that I was! let her put me off again unanswered. From that day I gave up all effort at self-control, and let myself drift blindly on—to destruction.
At length things became so bad between Mat and myself that it seemed as if an open rupture must be at hand. We avoided each other, scarcely exchanged a dozen sentences in a day, and fell away from all our old familiar habits. At this time—I shudder to remember it!—there were moments when I felt that I hated him.
Thus, with the trouble deepening and widening between us day by day, another month or five weeks went by, and February came; and, with February, the carnival. They said in Genoa that it was a particularly dull carnival; and so it must have been, for, save a flag or two hun
g out in some of the principal streets, and a sort of festa look about the women, there were no special indications of the season. It was, I think, the second day of the carnival, when, having been on the line all the morning, I returned to Genoa at dusk, and to my surprise found Mat Price on the platform. He came up to me and laid his hand on my arm.
‘You are in late,’ he said. ‘I have been waiting for you three-quarters-of-an-hour. Shall we dine together today?’
Impulsive as I am, this evidence of returning good will at once called up my better feelings.
‘With all my heart, Mat,’ I replied; ‘shall we go to Gozzoli’s?’
‘No, no,’ he said, hurriedly. ‘Some quieter place—some place where we can talk. I have something to say to you.’
I noticed now that he looked pale and agitated, and an uneasy sense of apprehension stole upon me. We decided on The Pescatore, a little out-of-the-way trattoria, down near the Molo Vecchio. There, in a dingy salon frequented chiefly by seamen, and redolent of tobacco, we ordered our simple dinner. Mat scarcely swallowed a morsel, but, calling presently for a bottle of Sicilian wine, drank eagerly.
‘Well, Mat,’ I said, as the last dish was placed on the table, ‘what news have you?’
‘Bad.’
‘I guessed that from your face.’
‘Bad for you—bad for me. Gianetta——’
‘What of Gianetta?’
He passed his hand nervously across his lips.
‘Gianetta is false—worse than false,’ he said in a hoarse voice. ‘She values an honest man’s heart just as she values a flower for her hair—wears it for a day, then throws it aside for ever. She has cruelly wronged us both.’
‘In what way? Good heavens, speak out!’
‘In the worst way that a woman can wrong those who love her. She has sold herself to the Marchese Loredano.’
The blood rushed to my head and face in a burning torrent. I could scarcely see, and dared not trust myself to speak.
‘I saw her going towards the cathedral,’ he went on, hurriedly. ‘It was about three hours ago. I thought she might be going to confession, so I hung back and followed her at a distance. When she got inside, however, she went straight to the back of the pulpit, where this old man was waiting for her. You remember him—an old man who used to haunt the shop a month or two back. Well, seeing how deep in conversation they were, and how they stood close under the pulpit with their backs towards the church, I fell into a passion of anger and went straight up the aisle, intending to say or do something, I scarcely knew what; but, at all events, to draw her arm through mine, and take her home. When I came within a few feet, however, and found only a big pillar between myself and them, I paused. They could not see me, nor I them; but I could hear their voices distinctly, and—and I listened.’
‘Well, and you heard——’
‘The terms of a shameful bargain—beauty on the one side, gold on the other; so many thousand francs a year; a villa near Naples—pah! it makes me sick to repeat it.’
And with a shudder, he poured out another glass of wine and drank it at a draught.
‘After that,’ he said presently, ‘I made no effort to bring her away. The whole thing was so cold-blooded, so deliberate, so shameful, that I felt I had only to wipe her out of my memory, and leave her to her fate. I stole out of the cathedral, and walked about here by the sea for ever so long, trying to get my thoughts straight. Then I remembered you, Ben; and the recollection of how this wanton had come between us and broken up our lives drove me wild. So I went up to the station and waited for you. I felt you ought to know it all; and—and I thought, perhaps, that we might go back to England together.’
‘The Marchese Loredano!’
It was all that I could say; all that I could think. As Mat had just said of himself, I felt ‘like one stunned’.
‘There is one other thing I may as well tell you,’ he added, reluctantly, ‘if only to show you how false a woman can be. We—we were to have been married next month.’
‘We? Who? What do you mean?’
‘I mean that we were to have been married—Gianetta and I.’
A sudden storm of rage, of scorn, of incredulity swept over me at this, and seemed to carry my senses away.
‘You!’ I cried. ‘Gianetta marry you! I don’t believe it.’
‘I wish I had not believed it,’ he replied, looking up as if puzzled by my vehemence. ‘But she promised me; and I thought when she promised it she meant it.’
‘She told me weeks ago that she would never be your wife!’
His colour rose; his brow darkened; but when his answer came, it was as calm as the last.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Then it is only one baseness more. She told me that she had refused you; and that was why we kept our engagement secret.’
‘Tell the truth, Mat Price,’ I said, well-nigh beside myself with suspicion. ‘Confess that every word of this is false! Confess that Gianetta will not listen to you, and that you are afraid I may succeed where you have failed. As perhaps I shall—as perhaps I shall, after all!’
‘Are you mad?’ he exclaimed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That I believe it’s just a trick to get me away to England—that I don’t credit a syllable of your story. You’re a liar, and I hate you!’
He rose, and laying one hand on the back of his chair, looked me sternly in the face.
‘If you were not Benjamin Hardy,’ he said, deliberately, ‘I would thrash you within an inch of your life.’
The words had no sooner passed his lips than I sprang at him. I have never been able distinctly to remember what followed. A curse—a blow—a struggle—a moment of blind fury—a cry—a confusion of tongues—a circle of strange faces. Then I see Mat lying back in the arms of a bystander; myself trembling and bewildered—the knife dropping from my grasp; blood upon the floor; blood upon my hands; blood upon his shirt. And then I hear those dreadful words:
‘Oh, Ben, you have murdered me!’
He did not die—at least, not there and then. He was carried to the nearest hospital, and lay for some weeks between life and death. His case, they said, was difficult and dangerous. The knife had gone in just below the collarbone, and pierced down into the lungs.
He was not allowed to speak or turn—scarcely to breathe with freedom. He might not even lift his head to drink. I sat by him day and night all through that sorrowful time. I gave up my situation on the railway; I quitted my lodging in the Vicolo Balba; I tried to forget that such a woman as Gianetta Coneglia had ever drawn breath.
I lived only for Mat; and he tried to live, more I believe for my sake than his own. Thus, in the bitter silent hours of pain and penitence, when no hand but mine approached his lips or smoothed his pillow, the old friendship came back with even more than its old trust and faithfulness. He forgave me fully and freely; and I would thankfully have given my life for him.
At length there came one bright spring morning, when, dismissed as convalescent, he tottered out through the hospital gates, leaning on my arm and feeble as an infant. He was not cured; neither, as I then learned to my horror and anguish, was it possible that he ever could be cured.
He might, with care, live for some years; but the lungs were injured beyond hope of remedy, and a strong or healthy man he could never be again. These, spoken aside to me, were the parting words of the chief physician, who advised me to take him further south without delay.
I took him to a little coast-town called Rocca, some thirty miles beyond Genoa—a sheltered lonely place along the Riviera, where the sea was even bluer than the sky, and the cliffs were green with strange tropical plants, cacti, and aloes, and Egyptian palms.
Here we lodged in the house of a small tradesman; and Mat, to use his own words, ‘set to work at getting well in good earnest’. But, alas! it was a work which no earnestness could forward. Day after day he went down to the beach, and sat for hours drinking the sea-air and watching the sails that came and went in the offing.
By-and-by he could go no further than the garden of the house in which we lived.
A little later, and he spent his days on a couch beside the open window, waiting patiently for the end. Ay, for the end! It had come to that. He was fading fast—waning with the waning summer, and conscious that the reaper was at hand. His whole aim now was to soften the agony of my remorse and prepare me for what must shortly come.
‘I would not live longer if I could,’ he said, lying on his couch one summer evening and looking up to the stars. ‘If I had my choice at this moment, I would ask to go. I should like Gianetta to know that I forgave her.’
‘She shall know it,’ I said, trembling suddenly from head to foot.
He pressed my hand.
‘And you’ll write to father?’
‘I will.’
I had drawn a little back, that he might not see the tears raining down my cheeks; but he raised himself on his elbow, and looked round.
‘Don’t fret, Ben,’ he whispered; laid his head back wearily upon the pillow—and so died.
And this was the end of it. This was the end of all that made life life to me. I buried him there, in hearing of the wash of a strange sea on a strange shore. I stayed by the grave till the priest and the bystanders were gone. I saw the earth filled in to the last sod, and the gravedigger stamp it down with his feet.
Then, and not till then, I felt that I had lost him for ever—the friend I had loved, and hated, and slain. Then, and not till then, I knew that all rest, and joy, and hope were over for me. From that moment my heart hardened within me, and my life was filled with loathing. Day and night, land and sea, labour and rest, food and sleep, were alike hateful to me.
THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories Page 16
