Enchanter's Nightshade

by Ann Bridge

  Uncertain whether Valentino would have opened the front door, and anxious as Tommaso to avoid any noise or commotion which might disturb the old lady, Agnese plumped for the back, in the cortile sporco; and perhaps for the first time in her life Suzy di Vill’ Alta came into her own house by the servants’ entrance. Valentino was hanging about, dressed now after a fashion; he also had at last come to feel a certain anxiety, as two o’clock came and passed; he muttered to Agnese, as she stood in the back passage, supporting the muffled figure of his mistress, that the cook had taken the hot water to the Marchesa’s room.

  “Help me to get her upstairs, and then get some brandy, quick,” Agnese hissed back. “These stairs—it is quicker.” Supporting her on both sides, they took her up the back stairs to her room, and put her on the couch. “Now the brandy— and Apollonia must fill some hot bottles,” Agnese said, going with him to the door to be out of ear-shot.

  “She is ill?” Valentino asked.

  “I fear it—don’t undress, you, and tell Tommaso to stay up a bit. We may have to send for the doctor.”

  “What has happened?” Valentino asked.

  “How should I know? But she is wet as a drowned cat, and chilled to the bone! Be quick with that brandy,” the maid snapped, fairly pushing him out of the door—she closed it, however, very gently after him.

  In those days personal servants in the country in Italy were rather good at first aid. Living, as a rule, far from any sort of medical help, they had to be. Agnese was. She pulled off all her mistress’s wet clothes, wrapped her in a fleecy dressinggown and blankets, and sat her in a chair; then she fetched a foot-bath of warm water and set her feet in it, making it gradually hotter and hotter with additions from the great brass-bound hammered copper cans, with their double spouts and brass lids, which Apollonia the cook had brought up. When Valentino came with the brandy she demanded mustard, and while he fetched that she gave the Marchesa a good tot of the spirit, mixed with hot water. She put the mustard in the foot-bath, and the stone hot bottles, presently produced by Apollonia, in the bed; she kept the cook to help her, and between them they sponged the Marchesa’s face and hands, and did their best to dry her hair, one or other of them continuously plying her with the hot brandy the while. To their astonishment they could not get her face and hands clean, even with soap and water—some darkish sticky substance was all over them, and gummed her damp hair into matted masses here and there. The cook, puzzled, bent and sniffed at the wet head. “Santa Vergine, it’s bird-lime!” she whispered. Agnese sniffed too. “It’s true!” she said. “In the name of all the Saints, what can have happened?”

  But she did not attempt to ask. She would not have thought it correct to do so in the cook’s presence, and she realised also that it would be of no use. The Marchesa sat limp and dazed in the chair, submitting to all their ministrations, “like a baby or an idiot”, as Apollonia said later downstairs—only once or twice she said “Grazie, Agnese,” in her usual courteous tones, though it was clear that she hardly knew what she was doing. The mechanism of habitual graciousness persisted through exhaustion, illness and dulled senses. This moved the maid strangely; tears came to her eyes. “Niente, niente, la Marchesa,” she murmured fervently, each time she heard those automatically spoken words. At last she and Apollonia had done all they could—the Marchesa lay in bed, still wrapped in her dressing-gown, with the bottles pushed to a suitable distance; her hands and feet were much warmer, and her partly-dried hair wrapped in a towel; she seemed sleepy and quiet. Agnese sent a message by Apollonia to say that Valentino and Tommaso need not sit up; she would do so herself, and there was in her opinion no need to send for the Doctor—she thought the Marchesa would do, now. Excited, seething with unsatisfied speculation, the seniors of the Vill’ Alta household retired to bed.

  But in the morning it was quite clear that the Marchesa Suzy would not “do”. One glance told Agnese that, when she slipped in at about 8 a.m. to look at her mistress. She was still more or less asleep, but she was shifting restlessly in the bed, and breathing heavily; her face was flushed, and a hand which she flung out above the bedclothes was burning hot when the maid touched it. Agnese’s experienced commonsense needed none of those glass thermometers, silly little breakable things, which the young Marchesa so constantly used on the Marchesina, to tell that here was high fever. She fetched an underling, sent her for the Marchese Francesco, and told him brusquely that the Marchesa was ill. The Doctor must be fetched—not the one from Pisignacco, but the good one from Gardone. (The Pisignacco doctor was a sort of cross between an apothecary and a vet, and Agnese, with a certain experience of Roman doctors, rated him at his true value.)

  The Marchese Francesco was rather fussed, as he always was by any sudden emergency calling for decisive action. He stood fiddling with the tassels of a more recent edition of the dressing-gown in which Valentino had appeared during the night, and then asked what was wrong with the Marchesa?

  “She went for a drive yesterday evening, without a proper wrap, and took a chill,” the maid returned, blandly.

  The Marchese bent and peered at his wife through his spectacles, and then addressed her—“Cara, come stà?”

  The Marchesa opened her large eyes, and stared full at him; then her face took on a look of horror, and she said in a small voice, but with an extraordinary intensity of expression, which gave it the piercing quality of a cry—“Roffredo! Help! It is not a joke! Come!”

  Those brief sentences, obviously spoken in delirium, sent the Marchese Francesco flying. Agostino was sent on horseback to Gardone for the doctor, a garden-boy was despatched to Sant’ Apollonia with a telegram in the same sense. (There was always a slight uncertainty in the Province as to which of these methods would prove the quicker, so in cases of grave emergency people used both.) And when her breakfast had been taken to her, he sent to beg an audience—it really almost amounted to that—of La Vecchia Marchesa. Unlike his brother Filippo the Marchese Francesco had not, so to speak, the run of his Mother’s room in the early morning; but the habit of a life-time was not to be broken—to her, in any trouble, he had always hastened, and to her he hastened now. Not even to his Mother had Francesco ever spoken his heart about his wife; the old lady had often wondered how far his placidity about her vagaries was due to indifference, how far to sheer obliviousness of them, and how far to a sort of resigned tact. But there could be no mistake about his distress and concern at that moment. Suzy was one of those fortunate women who are never ill, and the old Marchesa had to go back to the hours of her confinement, before Marietta’s birth, to find a parallel for her son’s present misery of anxiety. It seemed to her to be of exactly the same quality now as then, eighteen months after his marriage, and with a flash of surprise it occurred to her that perhaps after all Francesco, in some deep corner of his shy and incompetent heart, still loved the beautiful creature who, through all her adventures, had never shown him anything but graceful affection and courteous consideration—at least in little things, she amended to herself. And the old Marchesa knew how much fuller life is of little things than of big, and how no amount of righteousness over great issues, valuable as that may be, can by itself really replace the daily sweetening of life by just such small unfailing kindnesses. It might be, she thought, studying her son’s disturbed face, as he sat by her bed, his eyes, behind those masking lenses, fixed on her face in a pathetic appeal for reassurance and support—it might be that he loved Suzy still, and needed and longed for something more than she gave him, even though what she had given had been enough to keep love alive. It struck her suddenly that Francesco was getting to be an old man, a thought which had never occurred to her before. (To La Vecchia Marchesa the world was filled with incredibly youthful and immature people.) With unwonted warmth she comforted him, praised the Gardone doctor’s skill and Suzy’s superb constitution, and promised to see her as soon as she was dressed.

  The doctor arrived soon after eleven, and took a serious view. It was an acute congestio
n, it might develop into a pneumonia. There must be expert nursing—and two Moravian Sisters were telegraphed for from Padua; it was further than Venice, but the doctor had a high opinion of the hospital and nursing there. (Such a thing as a lay trained nurse hardly existed in Italy then outside Rome, where a handful of English ones drew immense fees.) And then he asked a number of questions as to the origin and onset of the illness. The Marchese Francesco repeated Agnese’s story of the drive and the thin wrap. The Doctor shook his head. That might account—but. so sudden and so sharp an attack looked more like some severe exposure or acute chill, such as might be caused by a wetting. The old Marchesa here intervened. The illness had only manifested itself this morning, the young Marchesa was already too ill to be questioned, she herself had as yet had no time to make enquiries. When the Doctor came again in the evening, she would probably be in a position to furnish him with such information as was necessary—she emphasised the word a little—for the conduct of the ease. In the meantime his instructions should be followed, and she wished him a very good morning. The determination of her speech and manner fairly swept him out of the room; the old Marchesa belonged to a generation which regarded doctors as a slightly superior sort of chemist, and treated them accordingly.

  But when the dog-cart had been despatched with the prescriptions to Gardone, and the Doctor’s more immediate instructions carried out, the old lady sent Giacinta to sit with the young Marchesa, and commanded Agnese’s attendance in her own room. She privately agreed entirely with the Doctor’s view that such an attack was not likely to be caused merely by a chilly drive, and she was determined to get to the bottom of the matter. That Suzy had gone out last night she knew, that it was to meet Roffredo or Carlo she guessed— she suspected the former, since an attempt at explanation and reconciliation was a fairly obvious move on either side. But she knew nothing more; the servants’ prudent manœuvres had been so successful and so silent that nothing of the nocturnal comings and goings in the house had reached her ears. When the maid appeared she dealt with her with something more than her usual unhesitating firmness.

  “Agnese, your mistress is gravely ill,” she said. “It is essential to know exactly what has caused this malady. You must tell me everything, do you understand? Everything that you know.”

  “Yes, la Marchesa. It is not dangerous, the Marchesa’s illness?” the maid said, in an anxious voice.

  “It is indeed dangerous,” the old lady answered, brusquely. “Now tell me, at what hour did the Marchesa return last night?”

  “Something after the two hours, la Marchesa.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Yes, la Marchesa.”

  “Did she seem well then?”

  “La Marchesa, no. She was wet and cold, very cold.”

  “Wet? It has not rained! How came she to be wet?”

  “I don’t know, la Marchesa. But she was wet all over and already drying again; her clothes were all torn, and there was something on them, and on her hair and hands—bird-lime, credo.”

  The old lady listened with a grave face. “Who drove her last night?”

  “Agostino, la Marchesa.”

  “Send him to me.”

  “La Marchesa, he is gone to Gardone for the medicines. And he did not bring the young Marchesa back. She dismissed him, early, early.”

  “Who did bring her back, then?”

  “Tommaso, la Marchesa, and I. When the Marchesa did not return, I grew anxious, and took the carriage, and we found her and brought her home.”

  “Found her where?” the old lady asked sharply.

  “On the road, la Marchesa, between here and Odredo. Walking along, stumbling and falling, without cloak or wrap, her hair all down and her face dirty! Oh, my poor mistress!” —and the maid began to cry.

  “She was alone?”

  “Quite, quite alone! And in such a condition! We had to carry her to the brougham—she could hardly stand,” the maid sobbed out, fairly letting herself go at last.

  “Stop snivelling, and keep your wits in your head!” the old Marchesa said sharply. “What did you do for her when you got in?”

  “Wrapped her in blankets, la Marchesa,” Agnese replied, obediently wiping her eyes, and sniffing—“and set her feet in hot mustard-water, and gave her brandy; and then put her to bed, well wrapped and with plenty of hot bottles. She slept, and I hoped she would be better this morning.”

  “You did well,” the old lady said briefly. She considered for a moment or two, tapping her old hand, her usual accompaniment to thought, on the arm of her chair. There was something extremely peculiar about the servant’s story. Then she looked hard at the maid, who stood, still sniffing and dabbing rather furtively at her eyes, before her.

  “Agnese, have you any idea where your mistress went last night?”

  “Yes, la Marchesa.”

  “Where then?”

  “To meet the young Signor Conte.”

  “How do you know this? Was there a letter?” (The old Marchesa had not lived for ninety-nine years among Italian servants for nothing.)

  “La Marchesa, yes,” the maid said simply.

  “Bring it to me.”

  So Roffredo’s epistle was fished out once more from its resting-place among the receipts, and put into la Vecchia Marchesa’s ancient hands. She dismissed the maid, and read it, sitting alone; when she had finished it she, like Agnese sniffed, but with a different intonation. Then she took her morocco-cornered writing-board, and indited a short note, in her fine spidery old writing, and despatched it, and waited, using her bright old wits on this extraordinary set of facts, but without, it must be confessed, much result.

  That note brought Count Roffredo over soon after colazione. She received him in her own sitting-room. The young man entered with, as she rather grudgingly conceded, an extremely good manner—courteous, slightly chastened, almost submissive, but without any underbred signs of being ill at ease. She looked at him consideringly, while he kissed her hand, seated himself at her bidding, and enquired after her health— no, she did not wonder at Suzy. He was young, but he had that quality, belonging neither to age nor youth, nor even to greatness of intellect, which makes some men’s mere entry into a room a matter of importance to those in it. A difficult gift for the possessor; difficult as beauty. Marietta, she thought, who would not have beauty, would have it too. But at the recollection of the unhappiness that this young man’s recent actions must ultimately bring on Marietta she hardened her heart against him.

  “What time did Suzy leave you last night, and where?”, she asked abruptly.

  The young man looked at her in apparent astonishment. “I did not see the Marchesa Suzy last night,” he said. “I have not seen her since the Meden picnic.”

  The old lady eyed him, as he afterwards said, like a monkey.

  “So—but you expected to see her, I presume?” she asked.

  “No, I did not—I had no reason to expect that pleasure,” the young man said, politely and quietly, but as if a little at a loss. A civil liar, anyhow, the old lady said to herself. But her quick irritability began to mount. Taking the letter from a little bag at her waist, she handed it to him, saying—“And you did not write this either, I suppose?” with fine sarcasm.

  The young man took it and read it, from beginning to end, and then looked up at the old lady with a grave and rather bewildered face.

  “No, I did not write it,” he said firmly. “I have never seen it before in my life.”

  The old Marchesa looked full at him, and he looked as steadily back at her.

  “So you deny it?” she said, coldly.

  “Most certainly I do,” he said, with vigour. “I have never in my life invited the Marchesa Suzy, or anyone else, to that ridiculous ruin—and since the picnic at Meden I have neither seen the Marchesa, nor held any sort of communication with her. And I should perhaps tell you that I was by no means in the mood to write her such a letter as this—“ he tapped his fine hand sharply on the outstretch
ed paper. His face had grown surprisingly angry. “I am penitent, I am ashamed of what happened the other night—but not towards her! But for her unwarrantable treatment of that unfortunate girl, I should never have been in the position to ‘lose my head and behave like an idiot’!” He shook the sheet of paper angrily before the old lady.

  “So—you put the blame on Suzy for your behaviour?” the old Marchesa said, getting angry in her turn.

  He checked at once, and his manner changed.

  “Not wholly, Marchesa,” he said gravely. “I know that what I did was inexcusable, and I regret it bitterly. But to this extent I do blame Suzy, that she dismissed that wretched girl without a shred of justification. Once for all, and to you, I wish to say this. I was in love with her, and we did meet— but only out walking, before breakfast—of all times!” the young man said, with a disarming inflection. “She would never do anything else—never for an instant would she neglect Marietta, or her duties. And for Suzy to allege impropriety, and dismiss her on these grounds without money enough to get home with, to turn her into the street—it was unpardonable!” He spoke steadily, but now with a sort of restrained vehemence.

  His anger, and still more his championship of Miss Prestwich, convinced the old Marchesa as nothing else could have done that he was in fact not the author of the letter which he still held. But his last speech sent her off on another tack.

  “Do you want to marry her” she asked.

  He looked slightly taken aback, and sat for a moment, obviously thinking.

  “Now, no,” he said at length. “If we had been left alone, if the thing had been allowed to run its course in peace, I think very likely I should have wished to. But this would give us a bad start. I should feel that I had been compromised into it, the Province would probably be odious to her, let alone Rome, and she—she is sensitive and proud; she would feel all her life that I had done it out of pity. It would make it too difficult. English, too! That is of itself a difficulty.” He looked hard at the old face opposite him—it was as if she were somehow drawing out of him secret truths of which he had never before been aware. “I shall never be able to be very thorough as a husband,” he said, with a curious simplicity. “I must make an easy marriage, with a wife who knows all the ropes and will do three-quarters of the work. An Italian, with her own resources—and a clever one.”