The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “Someone who inhabits this house?” Mrs. Powers asked.

  Adèle shook her head no.

  “Someone from the city or village?”

  Again, no.

  “Someone far away, perhaps? From across the ocean?”

  “Yes,” Adèle spoke. “Yes.”

  She could not, however, be induced to discover, or reveal, the man’s name.

  Will it surprise my reader that in the rush of the moment I began to rack my brain for some hint of who it might be? Chas? Was he not himself a mesmerist, when the occasion might be profitable? But no. I felt certain, even in the strange twilight of the moment, that it was no such thing.

  “Is this person alive on earth now?” Mrs. Powers asked in a mild voice.

  Adèle was silent; I know not how long.

  “He … whoever has come to us … has passed on?”

  “My husband,” I whispered, unable to keep silent. After all this time, all this distance?

  No, the child’s head jerked again.

  Mrs. Powers looked at me with deep sympathy. Her face now appeared very drawn or tired.

  Some minutes later she said only, “Who is it, please, Adèle?”

  After a further silence, the head finally jerked no.

  Mrs. Powers looked at me again now. She said nothing, but a little worm of fear seemed to creep across her aspect.

  Adèle’s tortured breathing started again. Mrs. Powers turned to her, waited, then said calmly, “Speak, Adèle. Tell Mrs. Fullerton who, please. Who is in such desperation to contact her?”

  The girl did not speak, nor move her head, but only continued the rough breathing and the fluttering of her pale eyelids.

  Finally, Mrs. Powers tried once more. “Are you sure this person is a man?”

  “Friend,” Adèle said. Her breathing suddenly subsided. “Friend …” She became silent again.

  Nothing Mrs. Powers said could induce Adèle, who was growing more and more calm now, to speak further.

  “He has left us,” Mrs. Powers finally said with a sigh.

  Everyone relaxed. One by one people took their hands off the table top and leaned back in their chairs. We all seemed to feel nothing now. Not the slightest current of air in the room or at the open window. Gradually, Adèle came back to us, awakening not like a woman who had passed through great labor and birth, but like a girl awakening from the deep, brief sleep of an illness.

  We began to talk. The men lit cigars, save Mr. Ruskin, who was speechless. Mrs. Powers rose and turned up the lamp in the corner, then she lighted two more, chasing the moonlight from the room. Adèle seemed to regain all her wakefulness. The women passed a pitcher of water about and began to drink from glasses Mrs. Powers had placed around the table.

  “I am exhausted,” Louise said.

  “Certainly that!” Gibbon offered. He smiled but looked shaken. “Not much of a ghost for such an ancient villa,” he added.

  Mrs. Powers turned to me. “Friend?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If it was not my husband …”

  “No,” she said. “It was not.” She looked directly at me and tried to smile encouragingly.

  “Then I can’t imagine…,” I said.

  THAT NIGHT I could not sleep. I read, examined sketches, and thought by lamplight.

  It was not until the following evening during a walk with Mr. Ruskin that I began to feel terrible foreboding. I had spoken to him of my years traveling and painting portraits in New England, and of my studies with Mr. Spooner. I had also told him about Tom and how he had fled (“in a state of innocence,” as I put it) with a certain young woman, most likely to England.

  Mr. Ruskin always avoided the Cascine—or dairy farm of the Grand Duke stretching park-like for two miles along the Arno—as the rendezvous of fashionables, idlers, and horse racers (and never so packed as in the hour or two before sunset). Instead, Mr. Ruskin and his companion, a valet named George, and a driver, took us—Gibbon, Ruskin, and me, and all of us wearing our summer straw hats—nearly three miles out of the city and onto the slopes of Fiesole, ancient cradle of Florence, where we began climbing.

  Mr. Ruskin grew quiet and thoughtful as I spoke, until he paused to point out a view of Vallombrosa. “Celebrated by John Milton,” he said wistfully. “Pardon me, Mrs. Fullerton. You were saying?”

  I now spoke of a troubling dream I had had three or four nights after the seance. In the dream I was again in Massachusetts on a fair spring day sitting up on our cart with Tom beside me, and we were happy, untroubled, as we sometimes were on certain fine days before any evil had come into our lives. Yet in the very midst of this dream of happiness I woke up perspiring.

  Mr. Ruskin remained silent.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I was going to say that Adèle’s performance was just so much humbuggery.”

  “For my sake, you mean?”

  “Frankly, yes. But I can’t be such an hypocrite now, if you’ll forgive me.”

  Again, I asked him to explain.

  “You see, earlier, when you once told me about you and your brother I felt for a moment that there might be something in it, but then I thought better of it. And I simply dismissed a certain … presentiment as an improbability. Yet perhaps I would have said something eventually.”

  “Go on, please, sir,” Gibbon said impatiently.

  “Yes. Well, there’s no hope for it now, is there,” he said. “You see you reminded me—as you spoke originally and then again just now with your dream—of a rude incident … an accident in a public house near Manchester, as I recall, reported not long ago by the British press. A scuffle that grew into something of a scandal, that is; an American, a skilled mechanic of some sort, you see.”

  “Yes, go on!”

  “This scuffle was apparently over some vile woman … and the young American, who was unarmed, was stabbed, wounded severely.”

  There was a certain inevitability about his words, as if I knew them to be true, resonating with terrible applicability.

  Against my own silence, and Gibbon’s, Mr. Ruskin finally went on. “I recall that they were both Americans, Mrs. Fullerton. I try not to pay much attention to such things, but the papers and the rabble were full of it for weeks. You see, it seems upon further investigation that the young man was traced back to some sort of foul business in America as well—murder, abductions, all manner of nastiness one might have expected from craftsmen who have become mere machines themselves. Monsters bred of monstrous mechanical processes of production. In any case, I believe there was talk of involving the American authorities, the American Consul or some such person.”

  “My God, Mr. Ruskin. Could he be arrested or deported or something as well?”

  “I can’t believe there is any real connection,” Gibbon said. “It is all too farfetched. And the girl was playing parlor tricks with us, in any case. Of course we were all taken in to some degree by her astounding performance, by the circumstances… .”

  “Please, Gibbon!” I said. “Please don’t say anything more. I can’t bear to think of Tom suffering, or dying. Perhaps Adèle felt something after all. She’s clearly an extraordinary child… .”

  “He was in hospital,” Mr. Ruskin said, “the last I heard: that’s all I can recall of it. Moreover, I left England shortly thereafter.”

  I could see that Mr. Ruskin was troubled. He had met Adèle on only two occasions, but he had obviously been smitten. I wondered if he credited Adèle now for her delicate and unearthly beauty—not unlike that in many of his favored frescoes—and for this strange confluence of my story and the public reports of “a young mechanic from America” and his “vile woman.”

  In silence, we continued to climb the hill, a substantial height suitable for a typical Etruscan city. Only as we approached the summit did any of us speak again.

  “I am sorry,” Mr. Ruskin began. “Perhaps Mr. Spooner is right, after all. There may be no connection here. Please do not trouble yourself pr
ematurely, Mrs. Fullerton. I shall look into it. As soon as I return to England, I’ll make the necessary inquiries to get to the bottom of it for you. There may very well be, as I say, no connection.”

  I could not bring myself to speak. We continued to climb in silence, the breeze growing comfortably cooler as we did so. For the moment, I was blind to the views from these hills where once disported Boccaccio’s fair Mensola and her enflamed Africo.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mr. Ruskin terminates his visit

  We passed archaic ruins of an amphitheater that must have once been magnificent and, as Mr. Ruskin assured us, were among the oldest in Europe—dating from Greek colonization of Eturia. And we eventually arrived at the San Francesco convent to rest under cypresses in the monk’s garden, with the permission of the Franciscans whom Mr. Ruskin knew from previous walks. While waiting for another glorious Italian moonrise, he began to recommend the monastery of Santa Novella for the Orgagnas and for the opportunity to purchase wonderful essences, as if to turn our minds from our earlier topic. He had, he told us, on a recent excursion purchased a little bottle of Lavender to present to his mother upon returning home and a bottle of Orange Blossom for himself. “Whatever you favor, they will have it,” he promised, “including as well Orange fruit, Lemon, Ambergris, Thyme, Myrtle Blossom, or whatever. They are well worth a visit.”

  On the plain below, during the day, late-June heat had become powerful, but one seemed merely to perspire and be done with it, without, I mean to say, that sense of oppressiveness one feels in New England summers. Walking about the city below of an afternoon in order to study paintings, one’s hands became too damp to touch sketch paper without spoiling it. Yet up here toward evening now we felt invigorated from our climbing and the stirring, cooler air. We watched the sun sinking behind the mountains of Carrara, the Apennines turning purple-and-gold, while below Florence seemed to sleep by the silvery Arno.

  When the rim of the moonrise arched gigantically over the horizon, the soft, melancholy cry of a Tuscan owl swept over us. Fireflies swam randomly in the night air as far as we could see downward into the early darkness of fields and lanes.

  “Today,” Mr. Ruskin said, a strange sad wistfulness in his voice, “I have been thinking about the flowers in the hills around Fiesole. And about Masaccio, after being in the Brancacci Chapel. Do you know that many flowers and plants from these hills, here even now I mean, are the originals of flowers in the old paintings? I have developed quite a collection of plants, my friends. Many of these masters were particular and accurate, even … botanical, I should say. Nothing of the general or generic, but the very plants and flowers themselves.” His hand swept over the descending landscape. “In the here and now of the flower there is quite enough of eternity, you see. Like the abundance of Florentine cherries and apricots. One need imagine no heavenly hothouses.”

  His words reminded me now of Mr. Spooner once saying, “Things in themselves have a latent power or meaning, but only when they are arranged in a context by the hand of a master painter or author does that power emerge with the voice of a creator.”

  “Ah yes, Masaccio!” I said dreamily, watching the moon. That prodigy had veered into death at about the same age as these two men beside me. But the greater mystery was how he had suddenly learned to animate the face and human figure with natural feeling and character that seemed to rise from beneath the surface of his paint. “After seeing him here, I added, I no longer wonder that Leonardo, Michaelangelo, del Sarto, Bartolomeo, Perugino, Bandinelli, and Raphael once came to pay homage and learn from the renderings of his brush.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Ruskin. “Here is true portraiture—veritable processions of those then-recognizable, without flattery or false, saintly beauty.”

  “I sometimes feel so saturated by such mastery in painting and sculpture, by the products of centuries,” Gibbon said, “that I am overwhelmed, and feel too insignificant to get on with my work. I have learned much in Florence whenever I visit, but I have begun to wonder if one isn’t better off finally to get away from it all, if one is to retain the courage to paint. And in Rome … well, the paralysis can be even more overwhelming for the greater number of magnificent objects, reaching back into the most obscure recesses of history. I have been to Rome, but I have never yet tried to work-there. I confess I’ve been so daunted by the prospect of living, even briefly, in Rome, that I have no desire to go immediately.” He turned to me. “Still, we must go eventually, Allegra.”

  “The fact is, for myself,” Mr. Ruskin said as he contemplated the still-fat moon, “I believe all the paintings I have been studying are making me understand something of religious people, whom I’ve surely never understood before, or agreed with on anything, save George Herbert, but now I have to say I have an affection for Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli. They make us believe everything they paint, do they not? Are we not fully persuaded that the Virgin was sitting under a golden canopy twenty feet high, with a crown of stars on her head, because Fra Angelico says so!”

  We agreed. The conversation continued in this vein until Mr. Ruskin said: “Ah, Mrs. Fullerton, are you sufficiently rested to return to the realms below? The moon will quite light our way—even the fireflies, as you see, have retreated before her generous luminosity.”

  AS WE BEGAN OUR DESCENT, he related the story of a recent visit to St. Ambrogio where he had found a “glorious fresco in a sacred, idolatrous little chapel” with an altarpiece he believed to be the work of Mino da Fiesole.

  “Well,” he said, “I called the sacristan, and a half dozen more monks one after the other. What, I asked, is the picture? By whom? ‘Non si sa. Molto antica.’ Who painted the altar piece? ‘Non si sa.’

  What did the fresco represent? ‘V’è un miracolo del Santo Sagramento.’ What miracle? And so on.

  “Not a soul among them could tell me a thing about it. Surely, the altarpiece is by Mino?

  ‘Non.’

  So I had them light candles and soon found Mino’s name in a corner, OPVS MINI, he never puts more, and they were suddenly delighted, for Mino’s work being very rare is of great value. And the Rosselli fresco—a crowd adoring the relic of holy blood—is magnificent, but all burned and smoked! And thus you have the intellectual condition of Florence in a phrase.”

  And thus did Mr. Ruskin return us to his favorite local subject, about which he then said he had not yet spoken or written nearly ‘viperously enough’—the apathy, ignorance, and listless sensuality, as he put it, of these Florentines, and the officious ignorance of the curators and guards in the Palazzo galleries, and so on. To hear him, one might never guess that Florence was also home to men and women of high accomplishment, of scholars and poets and thinkers, or of dignified receptions given in the grand old palaces and ancient villas—the salons hung with tapestries and paintings and mirrors, and rich in rare books and sculpture.

  “I was kept a week in getting permission at the Pitti!” he said. “Yet you see every villainous shop copyist sputtering away in their splendid rooms making copies for fashionable English fools. They deny those who love art yet yield their best things to plasterers and slaters. Their ‘restorations’ and ‘repairs’ spoil everything; they would do much better to heed Jonathan Oldbuck—all such ignorant restoring is but destroying!”

  I recited some apt lines from the Italian Wordsworth, Leopardi:

  Among the naked rocks, on the green bough,

  The beast and wild bird

  In customary oblivion of sleep

  Know not the deep ruin nor the changed

  State of the world… .

  “Indeed, Mrs. Fullerton, indeed!” he said smiling, as he walked jauntily down the lane. This was a theme that carried us most of the way down the slope by moonlight.

  At the outskirts of the city, in his carriage, deep night was upon us. As we were saying our good-evenings before staying in the city, Mr. Ruskin declined our invitation to lunch the following day, reminding us as he did so of the disciplin
es of his daily regimen. “I breakfast at seven on a single egg and bread and butter; have my dinner at two—soup and bouilli, a single dish of meat and no dessert, a glass and a half of wine. Then I continue my work till half-past five, when I walk until eight—to San Miniato, Galileo’s villa, Fiesole, what have you—and then come in for my tea and strawberries. And my rest.”

  He despaired of the coming feast of San Giovanni—a gross interruption of his concentration: “All day and night, dust and crowds and nuisances of every kind—and no getting into the churches or galleries! The Grand Duke shall be in the cathedral along with everybody blazing with diamonds, and orchestras beyond count, and everything to please the rabble besides—a vile rabble with nothing to do with their lives and so take no pleasure in doing nothing in honor of St. John, but push and stare.” He smiled pleasantly and bowed slightly to us in parting. “At least the country people who come will be pleased and pleasant to see.”

  Such is the monomania of genius. And the intolerance. And the fear of every potential distraction from the main thing. What I had come to understand from Mr. Ruskin, however, beneath his prejudices against these modern Italians and their fetes and fireworks and mosquitoes, was his passion for art, his vision of it, that is deeply Florentine in spite of himself: that is to say, to Mr. Ruskin a painting was a vital hieroglyph in our visible world (a world rife with the felicitous fulfillment of function in living things); to him art was a matter of renovating sensibility—and thereby our responsiveness to truth of every sort. He never spoke of masterworks as imitative, but rather as creative. He considered the greatest artist to be the greatest seer, the greatest interpreter, the greatest conveyor of ideas, the most sensible of human natures. By the little volume he gave to me, indicated only to have been written by “A Graduate of Oxford,” I also came to understand some of these principles more clearly, and I noticed certain associations between his ideas and Mr. Spooner’s.