Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Corona had nothing to conceal from Giovanni nor from herself. She had realised the rarest and highest form of lasting human happiness, which is to live unparted from the single being loved, with no screen of secret to cast a shadow on either side. Such a life can have but few emotions, yet the possibility of the very deepest emotion is always present in it, as the ocean is not rigid when it is quiet, as the strong man asleep is not past waking, nor the singer mute when silent.

  Corona had been moving quietly about the room, giving life to it by her touch, where mechanical hands had done their daily work of dull neatness. She loosened the flowers in a vase, moved the books on the table, pulled the long lace curtains a little out from under the heavy ones, turned a chair here and a knickknack there, set the little calendar on the writing-table, and moved the curtains again. Then at last she paused before the window. Her lids drooped thoughtfully and her mouth relaxed, as she made the remark which caused Giovanni to look up from his paper.

  ‘What strange people there are in the world!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘It is fortunate that they are not all like us,’ answered Giovanni.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The world would stop, I fancy. People would all be happy, as we are, and would shut themselves up, and there would be universal peace, the millennium, and a general cessation of business. Then would come the end of all things. Of whom are you thinking?’

  ‘Of those people who came to dinner last night, and of our boys.’

  ‘Of Orsino, I suppose. Yes — I know—’ He paused.

  ‘Yes,’ said Corona, thoughtfully.

  Both were silent for a moment. They thought together, having long been unaccustomed to think apart. At last Giovanni laughed quietly.

  ‘Our children cannot be exactly like us,’ he said. ‘They must live their own lives, as we live ours. One cannot make lives for other people, you know.’

  ‘Orsino is so apathetic,’ said Corona. ‘He opens his eyes for a moment and looks at things as though he were going to be interested. Then he closes them again, and does not care what happens. He has no enthusiasm like Ippolito. Nothing interests him, nothing amuses him. He is not happy, and he is not unhappy. You could not surprise him. I sometimes think that you could not hurt him, either. He is young, yet he acts like a man who has seen everything, done everything, heard everything, and tasted everything. He does not even fall in love.’

  Corona smiled as she spoke the last words, but her eyes were thoughtful. In her heart, no thoroughly feminine woman can understand that a young man may not be in love for a long time, and may yet be normally sensible.

  ‘I was older than he when you and I met,’ observed Giovanni.

  ‘Yes — but you were different. Orsino is not at all like you.’

  ‘Nor Ippolito either.’

  ‘There is more of you in him than you think, Giovanni, though he is so gentle and quiet, and fond of music.’

  ‘The artistic temperament, my dear, — very little like me.’

  ‘There is a curious tenacity under all that.’

  ‘No one has ever thwarted him,’ objected Giovanni. ‘Or, rather, he has never thwarted anybody. That is a better way of putting it.’

  ‘I believe he has more strength of character than the other three together. Of course, you will say that he is my favourite.’

  ‘No, dear. You are very just. But you are more drawn to him.’

  ‘Yes — strangely more — and for something in him which no one sees. It is his likeness to you, I think.’

  ‘Together with a certain feminility.’

  Giovanni did not speak contemptuously, but he had always resented Ippolito’s gentle grace a little. He himself and his other three sons had the strongly masculine temperament of the Saracinesca family. He often thought that Ippolito should have been a girl.

  ‘Do not say that, Giovanni,’ answered his wife. ‘He is not rugged, but he is strong-hearted. The artistic temperament has a certain feminine quality on the surface, by which it feels; but the crude creative force by which it acts is purely masculine.’

  ‘That sounds clever,’ laughed Giovanni.

  ‘Well, there is dear old Guache, whom we have known all our lives. He is an instance. You used to think he had a certain feminility, too.’

  ‘So he had.’

  ‘But he fought like a man at Mentana; and he thinks like a man, and he certainly paints like a man.’

  ‘Yes; that is true. Only we never had any artists in the family. It seems odd that our son should have such tendencies. None of the family were ever particularly clever in any way.’

  ‘You are not stupid, at all events.’

  Corona smiled at her husband. For all the world, she would not have had him at all different from his present self.

  ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘you need not think of him as an artist. You can look upon him as a priest.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ answered Giovanni, without much enthusiasm. ‘We never were a priest-breeding family either. We have done better at farming than at praying or playing the piano. Ippolito does not know a plough from a harrow, nor a thoroughbred colt from a cart-horse. For my part I do not see the strength you find in him, though I daresay you are right, my dear. You generally are. At all events, he helps the harmony of the family, for he worships Orsino, and the two younger ones always pair together.’

  ‘I suppose he will never be put into any position which can show his real character,’ said Corona, ‘but I know I am right.’

  They were silent for a few minutes. Presently Giovanni took up his paper again, and Corona sat down at her table to write a note. The rain pattered against the window, cheerfully, as it does outside a room in which two happy people are together.

  ‘That d’Oriani girl is charming,’ said Corona, after writing a line or two, but not looking round.

  ‘Perhaps Orsino will fall in love with her,’ observed her husband, his eyes on the newspaper.

  ‘I hope not!’ exclaimed Corona, turning in her chair, and speaking with far more energy than she had yet shown. ‘It is bad blood, Giovanni — as bad as any blood in Italy, and though the girl is charming, those brothers — well, you saw them.’

  ‘Bad faces, both of them. And rather doubtful manners.’

  ‘Never mind their manners! But their faces! They are nephews of poor Bianca Corleone’s husband, are they not?’

  ‘Yes. They are his brother’s children. And they are their grandfather’s grandchildren.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He was chiefly concerned in the betrayal of Gaeta — and took money for the deed, too. They have always been traitors. There was a Pagliuca who received all sorts of offices and honours from Joaquin Murat and then advised King Ferdinand to have him shot when he was caught at Pizzo in Calabria. There was a Pagliuca who betrayed his brother to save his own life in the last century. It is a promising stock.’

  ‘What an inheritance! I have often heard of them, but I have never met any of them excepting Bianca’s husband, whom we all hated for her sake.’

  ‘He was not the worst of them, by any means. But I never blamed her much, poor child — and Pietro Ghisleri knew how to turn any woman’s head in those days.’

  ‘Why did we ask those people to dinner, after all?’ enquired Corona, thoughtfully.

  ‘Because San Giacinto wished it, I suppose. We shall probably know why in two or three years. He never does anything without a reason.’

  ‘And he keeps his reasons to himself.’

  ‘It is a strange thing,’ said Giovanni. ‘That man is the most reticent human being I ever knew, and one of the deepest. Yet we are all sure that he is absolutely honest and honourable. We know that he is always scheming, and yet we feel that he is never plotting. There is a difference.’

  ‘Of course there is — the difference between strategy and treachery. But I am sorry that his plans should have involved bringing the Corleone family into our house. They are not nice people, excepting the girl.’
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br />   ‘My father remarked that the elder of those brothers was like an old engraving he has of Cæsar Borgia.’

  ‘That is a promising resemblance! Fortunately, the times, at least, are changed.’

  ‘In Sicily, everything is possible.’

  The remark was characteristic of Giovanni, of a Roman, and of modern times. But there was, and is, some truth in it. Many things are possible to-day in Sicily which have not been possible anywhere else in Europe for at least two centuries, and the few foreigners who know the island well can tell tales of Sicilians which the world at large could hardly accept even as fiction.

  CHAPTER VII

  DURING THE ENSUING weeks Orsino saw Vittoria d’Oriani repeatedly, at first by accident, and afterwards because he was attracted by her, and took pains to learn where she and her mother were going, in order to meet her.

  It was spring. Easter had come very early, and as happens in such cases, there was a revival of gaiety after Lent. There were garden parties, a recent importation in Rome, there were great picnics to the hills, and there were races out at the Capannelle; moreover, there were dances at which the windows were kept open all night, until the daylight began to steal in and tell tales of unpleasant truth, so that even fair women drew lace things over their tired faces as they hurried into their carriages in the cold dawn, glad to remember that they had still looked passably well in the candle-light.

  At one of these balls, late in the season, Orsino knew that he should meet Vittoria. It was in a vast old palace, from the back of which two graceful bridges crossed the street below to a garden beyond, where there were fountains, and palms, and statues, and walks hedged with box in the old Italian manner. There were no very magnificent preparations for the dance, which was rather a small and intimate affair, but there was the magnificent luxury of well-proportioned space, which belonged to an older age, there was the gentle light of several hundred wax candles instead of the cold glare of electricity or the pestilent flame of gas, and all night long there was April moonlight outside, in the old garden, whence the smell of the box, and the myrtle, and of violets, was borne in fitfully through the open windows with each breath of moving air.

  There was also, that night, a general feeling of being at home and in a measure free from the oppression of social tyranny, and from the disturbing presence of the rich social recruit, who was sown in wealth, so to say, in the middle of the century, and who is now plentifully reaped in vulgarity.

  ‘It is more like the old times than anything I remember for years,’ said Corona to Gianforte Campodonico, as they walked slowly through the rooms together.

  ‘It must be the wax candles and the smell of the flowers from the garden,’ he answered, not exactly comprehending, for he was not a sensitive man, and was, moreover, considerably younger than Corona.

  But Corona was silent, and wished that she were walking with her husband, or sitting alone with him in some quiet corner, for something in the air reminded her of a ball in the Frangipani palace, many years ago, when Giovanni had spoken to her in a conservatory, and many things had happened in consequence. The wax-candles and the smell of open-air flowers, and the glimpses of moonlight through vast windows may have had something to do with it; but surely there are times and hours, when love is in the air, when every sound is tuneful, and all silence is softly alive, when young voices seek each the other’s tone caressingly, and the stealing hand steals nearer to the hand that waits.

  There was no one to prevent Orsino Saracinesca from persuading Vittoria to go and sit down in one of the less frequented rooms, if he could do so. Her mother would be delighted, her brothers were not at the ball, and Orsino was responsible to no one for his actions. She had learned many things since she had come to Rome, but she did not understand more than half of them, and what she understood least of all was the absolute power which Orsino exerted over her when he was present. He haunted her thoughts at other times, too, and she had acquired a sort of conviction that she could not escape from him, which was greatly strengthened by the fact that she did not wish to be free.

  On his part, his mind was less easy, for he was well aware that he was making love to the girl with her mother’s consent, whereas he was not by any means inclined to think that he wished to marry her. Such a position might not seem strange to a youth of Anglo-Saxon traditions; for there is a sort of tacit understanding among the English-speaking races to the effect that young people are never to count on each other till each has got the other up the steps of the altar, that there is nothing disgraceful in breaking an engagement, and that love-making at large, without any intention of marriage, is a harmless pastime especially designed for the very young. The Italian view is very different, however, and Orsino was well aware that unless he meant to make Vittoria d’Oriani his wife, he was doing wrong in his own eyes, and in the eyes of the world, in doing his best to be often with her.

  One result of his conduct was that he frightened away other men. They took it for granted that he wished to marry her, dowerless as she was, and they kept out of his way. The girl was not neglected, however. San Giacinto had his own reasons for wishing to be on good terms with her brothers, and he made his wife introduce partners to Vittoria at dances, and send men to talk to her at parties. But as soon as Orsino came upon the scene, Vittoria’s companion disappeared, whoever he happened to be at the time.

  The Italian, even when very young, has a good deal of social philosophy when he is not under the influence of an emotion from which he cannot escape. He will avoid falling in love with the wrong person if he can.

  ‘For what?’ he asks. ‘In order to be unhappy? Why?’

  And he systematically keeps out of the way of temptation, well knowing his own weakness in love matters.

  But Orsino was attracted by the girl and yielded to the attraction, though his manner of yielding was a domination over her whenever they met. His only actual experience of real love had been in his affair with the Countess del Ferice, before her second marriage. She was a mature woman of strong character and devoted nature, who had resisted him and had sacrificed herself for him, not to him. He had been accustomed to find that resistance in her. But Vittoria offered none at all, a fact which gave his rather despotic nature a sudden development, while the absence of opposition made him look upon his disinclination to decide the question of marriage as something he ought to have been ashamed of. At the same time, there was the fact that he had grown somewhat cynical and cold of late years, and if not positively selfish, at least negatively careless of others, when anything pleased him, which was not often. It is bad to have strength and not to use it, to possess power and not to exert it, to know that one is a personage without caring much what sort of a person one may be. That had been Orsino’s position for years, and it had not improved his character.

  On this particular evening he was conscious of something much more like emotion than he had felt for a long time. San Giacinto had lain in wait for him near the door, and had told him that matters were settled at last and that they were to leave Rome within the week to take possession of the Corleone lands. The deeds had been signed and the money had been paid. There were no further formalities, and it was time to go to work. Orsino nodded, said he was ready, and went off to find Vittoria in the ballroom. But there was a little more colour than usual under his dark skin, and his eyes were restless and hungry.

  He was passing his mother without seeing her, when she touched him on the sleeve, and dropped Campodonico’s arm. He started a little impatiently, and then stood still, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘Has anything happened?’ she asked rather anxiously.

  ‘No, mother, nothing — that is—’ He hesitated, glancing at Campodonico. ‘I am going to Sicily with San Giacinto,’ he added in a low voice.

  Corona could not have explained what she felt just then, but she might have described it as a disagreeable chilliness creeping over her strong frame from head to foot. An hour later she remembered it, and the next day, and
for many days afterwards, and she tried to account for it by telling herself that the journey was to make a great change in her son’s life, or by arguing that she had half unconsciously supposed him about to engage himself to Vittoria. But neither explanation was at all satisfactory. She was not imaginative to that extent, as she well knew, and she at last made up her mind that it was an idle coincidence of the kind which some people call a warning, and remember afterwards when anything especial happens, though if nothing particular follows, they forget it altogether.