Enchanter's Nightshade

by Ann Bridge

  “Oh, Marchesa, I am grateful. You are very good to me,” the girl said, with the warm accents of happy sincerity.

  “Read it,” was the old woman’s only response.

  Almina did as she was told. Her colour rose once more as she read. With characteristic dry precision, but in no uncertain terms, she saw herself here praised and recommended as the most admirable of governesses. “Her conscientiousness and her devotion to her pupil are beyond praise.” “In spite of her youth, she shows a certain discretion.” “I have formed a very high opinion of her character”—these were among the phrases which stared out at her from the thin striped paper. When she came to the rather florid signature, “Isabella di Vill’ Alta”, she looked up at the old Marchesa with an almost bewildered face.

  The old lady nodded at her, very pleasantly. “That is precisely what I think about you, my dear Miss Prestwich,” she said. “As for the discretion,” she added, with something like a chuckle, “we have a proverb that no one is so discreet about fires as a burnt cat!”

  The girl tried to speak, and could not. “I—” she began, “I”

  The old Marchesa nodded at her again. “Enough, enough; it is said. You are relieved—I understand,” she said. “Now, tell me about your Mother. Has she heard anything of all this?”

  Almina’s mouth quivered. “No,” she said. “I—I have not written. I have tried, but I could not! That is the worst part of all, to tell her this. She—I do not know how she will bear it.”

  “You must not tell her,” said the old lady, very emphatically. “Why should you? It will cause her very great distress, and for what? How will she, or you, be the better for her knowing this?”

  Almina muttered that she had never concealed anything from her Mother.

  “So be it. Well, for her sake you will now begin! To tell her would be cruel—you must carry this burden alone. I repeat, you are not guilty—then keep your sorrow to yourself. As to the reason for your leaving here, I will write to her.” She got up as she spoke, and moved over to another of the spindly writing-tables of the Province, and sitting down, wrote in silence for some time, while Almina sat looking on. She, like Giulio, felt extraordinarily encouraged by the old Marchesa’s words; the future was not so dark and hopeless anymore.

  Presently the old lady called to ask for her Mother’s address; while she wrote it, the bade Miss Prestwich read what she had written. The letter was not a long one; it referred to the Marchesa Suzy’s grave illness, the probable need for a journey of recuperation later, the consequent necessity of making some other arrangement for Marietta, and the obvious desirability of her being with her cousin—it went on to mention the Grand-Duchess’s need for an English governess, and what pleasure the Marchesa had in recommending anyone so well-qualified, so conscientious, and so pleasant a member of a household as Mrs. Prestwich’s daughter. There followed some very kind expressions about that daughter, and the great regret with which the family at Vill’ Alta in general, and Marietta in particular, would part from her. Almina tried to read this document with her Mother’s sensible and slightly suspicious eyes—even to them, she felt that it must be completely convincing. There were tears in her own as she handed it back to the old lady.

  “You are very good to me, Marchesa,” she said, rather tremulously; “I cannot thank you as I should wish.”

  “Don’t trouble, my child; your face speaks,” the old woman said. “And now,” she went on, “before I leave I should like to speak once more with the good Countesses. Farewell, my dear Miss Prestwich,”—and as the girl rose from the little curtsey she had learned to make in the Province, she tapped her on the arm. “Remember, you are what you were,” she said. “Don’t forget it,” she called after her, as the girl left the room.

  To the Countess Aspasia, when she returned, she mentioned the proposed arrangements. “And in the mean time, my dear Aspasia, air is what she needs—of that I am sure. I should let her be constantly in the garden; let her sit there to read, to work. This has pulled her down.” Then she drank the inevitable Marsala which was offered to her, and went back to Castellone in her carriage. She told the Marchese Francesco that she was none the worse for her outing, and insisted on going down to dine with him. But on the drive home Giacinta noticed with concern that once or twice her aged mistress laid her little gloved hand to the left side of her bosom; and in the salone after dinner, even before the coffee came, she fell asleep in her chair.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Two days after La Vecchia Marchesa’s visit to Castellone Miss Prestwich was sitting out in the garden, whither she had been duly hunted by the Countess Aspasia. With a book and a some needlework, she had wandered along to the wild part, and was now settled on a seat shaded by a group of cypresses at the top of the eastern slope. Below her the ground fell away fairly steeply, the dry whitish grass barred by the pointed solid shadows of the cypresses, or blotched like a snow-leopard’s coat with the round mottled patches of shade thrown by the umbrella pines; above their domed darkgreen tops the eye travelled off to the distant circle of the mountains. Almina was neither sewing nor reading. From where she sat she could see the Monte Canone, its blunt squarish summit silvery with a powdering of new snow, the first of the year; she was thinking of the day when she had first seen it, from the churchyard wall at Macerbo, and Roffredo had told her its name. She had met him and the mountain, for the first time, together! She recalled that scene now with a curious cold detachment; she felt as if she were cut off from all personal connection with it by the events which had come in between. So a man might look at a hand or foot which, after hurting him intolerably, had been amputated, she thought.

  La Vecchia Marchesa’s visit had effected an even more profound change in Almina’s mood than the old lady’s intervention had made in Giulio’s. To understand how profound one must remember that for nearly three weeks, after the most severe shock of her life, the girl had been living in almost complete mental isolation, without anyone to whom she could speak freely about her feelings. Only those who have lived through that particular experience, of receiving a crippling blow while among strangers, can have the least idea what this means—how exhausting, how stifling is the effort, renewed day after day, to talk with composure on indifferent subjects while one is ready to scream with mental distress; never to know the relief of easing by speech, even for a moment, the pressure which is so nearly unbearable—and only those also know how overwhelming, when at last it does come, that relief is, and the mind is freed from its spiked prison of solitude and silence. Almina’s conversation with the old Marchesa, short as it was, had afforded her something of that relief, and released the accumulation of anxiety and pain which had been piling up within her. And the arrangements for her future which the old lady proposed had given her a further sweet relief; not only new hope, but—in the circumstances almost more important—a fresh orientation to her thoughts. How she had slept, that night—what a breakfast she had eaten the next morning! And with how thankful a heart, on the previous day, she had written to her Mother, giving her own account of the Marchesa Suzy’s illness, the arrangements for Marietta, and the old Marchesa’s plans for herself, for which she asked her Mother’s sanction. She had apologised for her silence, pleading, not quite ingenuously, the general stir and upset; but the mere fact of being in communication with her Mother again, even disingenuously, had afforded her a quite exquisite comfort.

  But the writing of that letter had somehow, for her, brought Gardone to an end. Even as she set down the sentences with her pen she had had a curious feeling of finality; and it persisted. Her body in its clothes, her trunks and boxes, would only go presently, but she herself had already left the Province, she felt. With an almost dreamy sense of the strangeness of this feeling, as she sat now gazing at the silvered head of the Canone she found herself looking back at Gardone as one does at a place that one has recently quitted. The strangeness lay in the fact that for months now life as it was lived there, so differently from in E
ngland, had seemed part of the very stuff of her own life, so familiar was it grown—and now she was remote from it. She thought of that life:—the food—its tastes, and still more its smells, which travelled the wide corridors and passed out into the garden; of the clear eastern light in her high-windowed room at Vill’ Alta in the early mornings, and the tray coming in with her breakfast— the fruit, the coffee, the starfish rolls; of the hot golden glow in the school-room when they sat working there with the sun-blinds down, and the droning noise of the bees in the terrace flower-beds came up from below, and mingled with the irregular scratching of Marietta’s pen; she thought of the afternoon walks through all the delicate detail of that countryside—the roadside vines, the high blocks of maize and gran turco throwing black solid masses of shade, and the slender tufts of acacias on the little green knolls; of the smell of dust, the white horses’ hairs on their clothes when they rode in the carriage, and after, the syrupy sickliness of Marsala in cool shaded rooms, and the high, rather nasal, penetrating gabble of Italian voices there. All this had been part of her; Italy was this to her now. And as she reviewed it, still with that wondering sense of being severed from it, those who had peopled this scene came clearly into her mind, in a sort of procession;—the old Marchesa, with her black stick and her white lace, her crisp sentences; the Marchesa Suzy, indolent and graceful in her hammock, with her flowing skirts, her gold mesh bag and her tiny cigarette; the Marchese Francesco peering through his thick glasses, the Marchese Paolo eating incredibly and gobbling out the story about the Bach manuscripts that were tied round fruit trees to keep off the insects; Graziella carrying in hot water, and pausing to gossip; Marietta—oh, Marietta doing everything, everywhere! She turned away from that thought to the other household— Umberto bowing and beaming at the front door, Count Carlo stroking his beard and talking about vines or manures, Giulio’s impatient face then, and his quietly eager one when he came to work with her, his occasional bursts of mischief with Marietta and Elena; Elena herself, with her shining fashionable head and her lively malice, affectionately tormenting Fräulein Gelsicher; and the Swiss with her plain kind face, her shrewd speech, and her bonté, preoccupied always about Anna or Ospedi or someone, but still lending a kindly ear, and poking constantly at the pads which always showed through her thinning grey hair.

  Last of all, almost reluctantly, her thoughts moved again to Roffredo. The strangest thing of all was that he was now somehow less clear, less solid than the rest of this procession. Though she did not fully realise it, her own past feelings had blurred him to her—he had been a mouth and hands and a voice murmuring endearments, an excitement and a pain for so long that his face, his bright head and his laughter, his splendid movements and his imperious manner had become ghostly. She struggled for a little while to clothe this ghost with life, so that she might, from this distance, this new remoteness, see him as he was. But it was too difficult, and hurt too much—she gave it up, for the moment. Of them all, of those figures which had filled her world, she found that the most vivid and solid were, not he, but Marietta, the Swiss, and the old Marchesa.

  The thought of the old Marchesa switched her mind off this reviewing of the past, and brought it back to their interview of two days before. She was an incredible old woman, to have thought out this plan, driven all that distance to give this help to a stranger, three days before she was a century old! Almina recalled the picture of her, sitting there in the Countesses’ drawing-room, with a sort of awe. For the twentieth time she went over in her mind the old lady’s words to her. It seemed very strange to the English girl that there should have been no condemnation, no hint of cheapening of her in the old Marchesa’s attitude. On the contrary, in an utterly startling way she had minimised the episode at the villa, brushing it aside as an accident. “Is it the body which is immortal?” The very tone in which she had asked the astonishing question still rang in the English governess’s ears. But the Marchesa had always seemed to her wise—was it not possible that she was right? Right not merely in an Italian way, but ultimately right? Were the sins and disasters of the body perhaps not so all-important, so finally ruinous as she had been brought up to believe? “You are the same, remember”—she could hear the old woman’s thin sharp voice, with its great precision of syllables, saying that too. Since this idea had been put into her mind, forty-eight hours before, the girl’s nature, eager to revive, had begun tentatively to embrace it—she began to find that her feelings now followed her thought. “I do feel almost the same,” she said, half-incredulously, to herself.

  But she was beginning to see another side of the whole affair more clearly too. If she was not irremediably stained by Roffredo’s embrace, when she was hardly conscious of it, still there had been conscious wrong-doing. She could face that, now. She had been wrong when she had not, at any risk of losing her job, told the Marchesa about Roffredo; wrong when she had persisted, framing excuses, in those secret meetings. These things did affect her; they were the things of the will. And there had been a measure of something like error when she had surrendered her standards of what was really lovable and admirable to a purely physical charm. As she sat there, on a seat quite close to the one on which Roffredo had first kissed her, she went on to think—shyly, but with a quite novel attempt at honesty and clarity—about the nature of love. Oh, why had no one told her that the body exists, that the body has its own life and needs, and may betray the mind and the will? Why had no one ever told her what to expect, and how to deal with those overpowering blisses which could be, apparently, so unrelated to the soul? Why had no one ever spoken of all this to her? “It is there!” she said aloud, in a sort of anger: “it must often happen. They” (she meant Elena and Marietta) “know it does. I can’t be, I’m not the only one. Why should I not have been allowed to know? I don’t see how I could have known, alone.”

  She thought again, as she had so often thought in Gardone, of her Mother’s final injunction to her—“Be prudent.” Now she was critical of it. She had not been prudent, it was true; but all the same the advice struck her as inadequate. “That really comes to telling you not to love,” she said to herself. “What one wants to know is how to love. There must be a right way of loving; just being careful and holding back can’t really be the best thing.”

  In this critical mood she thought again of her relation with Roffredo, and now her thought was more gentle to it. Spoiled as it had been, wretched as it had left her, it had not been wholly ugly and bad—there had been elements of beauty and tenderness in it. Oh yes, there had, she thought, tears starting to her eyes; and if only she had known more about it, known how to love, those things might have been preserved. Elena had whole codes of rules for dealing with men which she, Almina, had brushed aside as Italian and not very niceminded; it occurred to her at last that even these might be a very useful and practical branch of knowledge. But now it was too late, she thought sadly, staring out over the green domes of the stone pines at the soft outlines of the mountains; she was leaving Gardone now, she would never profit by what Elena could have taught. She would have to go on with only her own bitter and unillumined experience to guide her.

  A cracking of dry twigs on the slope below and to her right made her glance down in that direction. Giulio di Castellone, looking very hot, was scrambling up through the trees towards her. When he reached her side he bowed and shook hands, saying “Buon giorno, Signorina,” rather formally; then he pulled a note out of his pocket, and handed it to her—“Bonne-Mama asked me to bring you this,” he said.

  Startled and embarrassed by this unexpected visitor, Almina took the note; “Read it, read it!” he said, as she hesitated.

  The girl did so. It was one of the old Marchesa’s usual command-requests, to the effect that she desired Miss Prestwich to come over to Vill’ Alta on the following morning— “to see my grandchild, who will be spending the day here, since it is, as perhaps you know, my birthday.” The note added that the Vill’ Alta carriage would be sent to fetch Miss Prest
wich and would take her back to Castellone in time for lunch; and desired her further to have the goodness to inform the two Countesses of the arrangement.

  Almina looked up from the sheet to Giulio with a stir of colour and shining eyes.

  “How good the Marchesa is!” she said. “I am to go over tomorrow to see Marietta!” In her pleasure and surprise the first embarrassment of this visit was quite swept away.

  “I know,” he said, standing and nodding at her with an air of great self-satisfaction. “I arranged it.”

  “You did?”

  “Certainly. I knew Marietta wanted to see you very badly, and I thought you would also wish to see her, so I told La Vecchia; and she settled it, and told me to bring the note.”

  “That was good of you. I did want to see her, very much. How is she?” Miss Prestwich asked.

  “Oh, she is well,” the boy said, rather off-handedly. “She misses you terribly,” he added abruptly.

  This brought embarrassment back again, and now in full force. Giulio had by this time seated himself by Miss Prestwich on the rough bench; as he spoke he looked at her. Her colour rose painfully at his remark—she turned her head away. He watched her for a moment, remembering suddenly the fast time that he had seen her blush—on the day of her arrival, when she caught sight of the geraniums which he had stuck behind the fingers of the Venus on the terrace at Vill’ Alta. That brought such a rush of memories of one sort and another that he too felt his face begin to burn, and in his turn he looked away. They sat so, bound in a curious helplessness, for a moment or two. Then he said, with an effort, “I am going to Oxford.”