The two were not men who ever talked together of their principles, though they sometimes spoke of their beliefs and differed about them. Belief is usually absolute, but principle is always a matter of conscience, and the conscience is a part of the mixed self in which soul and mind and matter are all involved together. Men born in the same surroundings and brought up in the same way generally hold to the same principles as guides in life, and show the same abhorrence for the sins that are accounted dishonourable, and the same indulgence for those not condemned by the code of honour, not even admitting discussion upon such points. But the same men may have very different opinions about spiritual matters.
Eliminating the vulgar average of society, there remain always a certain number who, while possibly holding even more divergent beliefs than most people, agree more precisely, or disagree more essentially, about matters of conscience, either stretching or contracting the code of honour according to their own temper, and especially according to the traditions of their own most immediate surroundings. Other conditions being favourable, it seems as if men whose consciences are most alike should be the best fitted for each other’s friendship, no matter what they may think or believe about religion.
This was certainly the case with Guido d’Este and Lamberto Lamberti, and they simultaneously dismissed, as detestable, dishonourable, and unworthy, the mere thought that Guido should try to marry an heiress, with a view to satisfying the outrageous claims of his ex-royal aunt, the Princess Anatolie.
“In simpler times,” observed Lamberti, who liked to recall the middle ages, “we should have poisoned the old woman.”
Guido did not smile.
“Without meaning to do her an injustice,” he answered, “I think it much more probable that she would have poisoned me.”
“With the help of Monsieur Leroy, she might have succeeded.”
At the thought of the man whom he so cordially detested, Lamberti’s blue eyes grew hard, and his upper lip tightened a little, just showing his teeth under his red moustache. Guido looked at him and smiled in his turn.
“There are your ferocious instincts again,” he said; “you wish you could kill him.”
“I do,” answered Lamberti, simply.
He rose from his seat and stretched himself a little, as some big dogs always do after the preliminary growl at an approaching enemy.
“I think Monsieur Leroy is the most repulsive human being I ever saw,” he said. “I am not exactly a sensitive person, but it makes me very uncomfortable to be near him. He once gave me his hand, and I had to take it. It felt like a live toad. How old is that man?”
“He must be forty,” said Guido, “but he is wonderfully well preserved. Any one would take him for five-and-thirty.”
“It is disgusting!” Lamberti kicked a pebble away, as he stood.
“He looked just as he does now, when I was seventeen,” observed Guido.
“The creature paints his face. I am sure of it.”
“No. I have seen him drenched in a shower, when he had no umbrella. The rain ran down his cheeks, but the colour did not change.”
“It is all the more disgusting,” retorted Lamberti, illogically, but with strong emphasis.
Guido rose from his seat rather wearily. As he stood up, he was much taller than his friend, who had seemed the larger man while both were seated.
“I am glad that we have talked this over,” he said. “Not that talking can help matters, of course. It never does. But I wanted you to know just how things stand, in case anything should happen to me.”
Lamberti turned rather sharply.
“In case what should happen to you?” he asked, his eyes hardening.
“I am very tired of it all,” Guido answered, “I have nothing to live for, and I am being driven straight to disgrace and ruin without any fault of my own. I daresay that some day I may — well, you know what I mean.”
“What?”
“I should not care to exile myself to South America. I am not fit for that sort of life.”
“Well?”
“There is the other alternative,” said Guido, with a tuneless little laugh. “When life is intolerable, what can be simpler than to part with it?”
Lamberti’s strong hand was already on his friend’s arm, and tightened energetically.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked abruptly.
“No. At least, I think not.”
“I do,” said Lamberti, with conviction, “and I shall not let you make away with yourself if I can help it.”
He loosed his hold, thrust his hands into his pockets, and looked as if he wished he could fight somebody or something.
“A man who kills himself to escape his troubles is a coward,” he said.
Guido made a gesture of indifference.
“You know very well that I am not a coward,” he said.
“You will be, the day you are afraid to go on living,” returned his friend. “If you kill yourself, I shall think you are an arrant coward, and I shall be sorry I ever knew you.”
Guido looked at him incredulously.
“Are you in earnest?” he asked.
“Yes.”
There was no mistaking the look in Lamberti’s hard blue eyes. Guido faced him.
“Do you think that every man who commits suicide is a coward?”
“If it is to escape his own troubles, yes. A man who gives his life for his country, his mother, or his wife, is not a coward, though he may kill himself with his own hand.”
“The Church would call him a suicide.”
“I do not know, in all cases,” said Lamberti. “I am not a theologian, and as the Church means nothing to you, it would be of no use if I were.”
“Why do you say that the Church means nothing to me?” Guido asked.
“Since you are an atheist, what meaning can it possibly have?”
“It means the whole tradition of morality by which we live, and our fathers lived. Even the code of honour, which is a little out of shape nowadays, is based on Christianity, and was once the rule of a good life, the best rule in the days when it grew up.”
“I daresay. Even the code of honour, degenerate as it is, and twist it how you will, cannot give you an excuse for killing yourself when you have always behaved honourably, or for running away from the enemy simply because you are tired of fighting and will not take the trouble to go on.”
“Perhaps you are right,” Guido answered. “But the whole question is not worth arguing. What is life, after all, that we should attach any importance to it?”
“It is all you have, and you only have it once.”
“Who knows? Perhaps we may come back to it again, hundreds and hundreds of times. There are more people in the world who believe that than there are Christians.”
“If that is what you believe,” retorted Lamberti, “you must believe that the sooner you leave life, the sooner you will come back to it.”
“Possibly. But there is a chance that it may not be true, and that everything may end here. That one chance may be worth taking.”
“There is a chance that a man who deserts from his ship may not be caught. That is not an argument in favour of desertion.”
Guido laughed carelessly.
“You have a most unpleasant way of naming things,” he said. “Shall we go? It is growing late, and I have promised to see my aunt before dinner.”
“Will there be any one else there?” asked Lamberti.
“Why? Did you think of going with me?”
“I might. It is a long time since I have called. I think I shall be a little more assiduous in future.”
“It is not gay, at my aunt’s,” observed Guido. “Monsieur Leroy will be there. You may have to shake hands with him!”
“You do not seem anxious that I should go with you,” laughed Lamberti.
Guido said nothing for a moment, and seemed to be weighing the question, as if it might be of some importance. Lamberti afterwards remembered the slight hesit
ation.
“By all means come,” Guido said, when he had made up his mind.
He glanced once more at the place, for he liked it, and it was pleasant to carry away pictures of what one liked, even of a bit of neglected old garden with a stone-pine in the middle, clearly cut out against the sky. He wondered idly whether he should ever come again — whether, after all, it would be cowardly to go to sleep with the certainty of not waking, and whether he should find anything beyond, or not.
The world looked too familiar to him to be interesting, as if he had known it too long, and he vaguely wished that he could change it, and desire to stay in it for its own sake; and just then it occurred to him that every man carries with him the world in which he must live, the stage and the scenery for his own play. It would be absurd to pretend, he thought, that his own material world was the same as Lamberti’s, even when the latter was at home. They knew the same people, heard the same talk, ate the same things, looked on the same sights, breathed the same air. There was perhaps no sacrifice worthy of honourable men which either of them would not make for the other. Yet, to Guido d’Este, life seemed miserably indifferent where it did not seem a real calamity, while to Lamberti every second of it was worth fighting for, because it was worth enjoying.
Guido looked at his friend’s tanned neck and sturdy shoulders, following him to the door, and he realised more clearly than ever before that he was not of the same race. He felt the satiety bred in many generations of destiny’s spoilt and flattered sons; the absence of anything like a grasping will, caused by the too easy fulfilment of every careless wish; the over-critical sense that guesses at hidden imperfection, the cruelly unerring instinct of a taste too tired to enjoy and yet too fine to be deceived.
Lamberti turned at the door and saw his face.
“What are you thinking about?”
“I was envying you,” Guido murmured. “You are glad to be alive.”
Lamberti made rather an impatient gesture, but said nothing. The Sister who had admitted the two opened the little iron door for them to go out. She was a small woman, with a worn face and kind brown eyes, one of the half-dozen who live in the little convent and work among the children of the very poor in that quarter. Both men had taken out money.
“For the poor children, if you please,” said Guido, placing his offering in the nun’s hand.
“And tell them to pray for a man who is in trouble,” added Lamberti, giving her money.
She looked at him curiously, thinking, perhaps, that he meant himself. Then she gravely bent her head.
“I thank you very much,” she said.
The small iron door closed with a rusty clang, and the friends began to descend the steep way that leads down from the Porta San Pancrazio to the Via Garibaldi.
“Why did you say that to the nun?” asked Guido.
“Are you past praying for?” enquired Lamberti, with a careless and good-natured laugh.
“It is not like you,” said Guido.
“I do not pretend to be more consistent than other people, you know. Are you going directly to the Princess’s?”
“No. I must go home first. The old lady would never forgive me if I went to see her without a silk hat in my hand.”
“Then I suppose I must dress, too,” said Lamberti. “I will leave you at your door, and drive home, and we can meet at your aunt’s.”
“Very well.”
They walked down the street and found a cab, scarcely speaking again until they parted at Guido’s door.
He lived alone in a quiet apartment of the Palazzo Farnese, overlooking the Via Giulia and the river beyond. The afternoon sun was still streaming through the open windows of his sitting room, and the warm breeze came with it.
“There are two notes, sir,” said his servant, who had followed him. “The one from the Princess is urgent. The man wished to wait for you, but I sent him away.”
“That was right,” said Guido, taking the letters from the salver. “Get my things ready. I have visits to make.”
The man went out and shut the door. He was a Venetian, and had been in the navy, where he had served Lamberti during the affair in China. Lamberti had recommended him to his friend.
Guido remained standing while he opened the note. The first was an engraved invitation to a garden party from a lady he scarcely knew. It was the first he had ever received from her, and he was not aware that she ever asked people to her house. The second was from his aunt, begging him to come to tea that afternoon as he had promised, for a very particular reason, and asking him to let her know beforehand if anything made it impossible. It began with “Dearest Guido” and was signed “Your devoted aunt, Anatolie.” She was evidently very anxious that he should come, for he was generally her “dear nephew,” and she was his “affectionate aunt.”
The handwriting was fine and hard to read, though it was regular. Some of the letters were quite unlike those of most people, and many of them were what experts call “blind.”
Guido d’Este read the note through twice, with an expression of dislike, and then tore it up. He threw the invitation upon some others that lay in a chiselled copper dish on his writing table, lit a cigarette, and looked out of the window. His aunt’s note was too affectionate and too anxious to bode well, and he was tempted to write that he could not go. It would be pleasant to end the afternoon with a book and a cup of tea, and then to dine alone and dream away the evening in soothing silence.
But he had promised to go; and, moreover, nothing was of any real importance at all, nothing whatsoever, from the moment of beginning life to the instant of leaving it. He therefore dressed and went out again.
CHAPTER II
LAMBERTO LAMBERTI NEVER wasted time, whether he was at sea, doing his daily duty as an officer, or ashore in Africa, fighting savages, or on leave, amusing himself in Rome, or Paris, or London. Time was life, and life was far too good to be squandered in dawdling. In ten minutes after he had reached his room he was ready to go out again. As he took his hat and gloves, his eye fell on a note which he had not seen when he had come in.
He opened it carelessly and found the same formal invitation which Guido had received at the same time. The Countess Fortiguerra requested the pleasure of his company at the Villa Palladio between four and six, and the date was just a fortnight ahead.
Lamberti was a Roman, and though he had only seen the Countess three or four times in his life, he remembered very well that she had been twice married, and that her first husband had been a certain Count Palladio, whose name was vaguely connected in Lamberti’s mind with South American railways, the Suez Canal, and a machine gun that had been tried in the Italian navy; but it was not a Roman name, and he could not remember any villa that was called by it. Palladio — it recalled something else, besides a great architect — something connected with Pallas — but Lamberti was no great scholar. Guido would know. Guido knew everything about literature, ancient and modern — or at least Lamberti thought so.
He had kept his cab while he dressed, and in a few minutes the little horse had toiled up the long hill that leads to Porta Pinciana, and Lamberti got out at the gate of one of those beautiful villas of which there are still a few within the walls of Rome. It belonged to a foreigner of infinite taste, whose love of roses was proverbial. A legend says that some of them were watered with the most carefully prepared beef tea from the princely kitchen. The rich man had gone back to his own country, and the Princess Anatolie had taken the villa and meant to spend the rest of her life there. She was only seventy years old, and had made up her mind to live to be a hundred, so that it was worth while to make permanent arrangements for her comfort.
Lamberti might have driven through the gate and up to the house, but he was not sure whether the Princess liked to see such plebeian vehicles as cabs in her grounds. He had a strong suspicion that, in spite of her royal blood, she had the soul of a snob, and thought much more about appearances than he did; and as for Monsieur Leroy, he was one of the most
complete specimens of the snob species in the world. Therefore Lamberti, who now had reasons for wishing to propitiate the dwellers in the villa, left his cab outside and walked up the steep drive to the house.
He did not look particularly well in a frock coat and high hat. He was too muscular, his hair was too red, his neck was too sunburnt, and he was more accustomed to wearing a uniform or the rough clothes in which fighting is usually done. The footman looked at him and did not recognise him.
“Her Highness is not at home,” said the man, coolly.
A private carriage was waiting at a little distance from the porch, and the footman who belonged to it was lounging in the vestibule within.
“Be good enough to ask whether her Highness will see me,” said Lamberti.
The fellow looked at him again, and evidently made up his mind that it would be safer to obey a red-haired gentleman who had such a very unusual look in his eyes and spoke so quietly, for he disappeared without making any further objection.
When Lamberti entered the drawing-room, he was aware that the Princess was established in a high arm-chair near a tea-table, that Monsieur Leroy was coming towards him, and that an elderly lady in a hat was seated near the Princess in an attitude which may be described as one of respectful importance. He was aware of the presence of these three persons in the room, but he only saw the fourth, a young girl, standing beside the table with a cup in her hand, and just turning her face towards him with a look that was like a surprised recognition after not having seen him for a very long time. He started perceptibly as his eyes met hers, and he almost uttered an exclamation of astonishment.
He was checked by feeling Monsieur Leroy’s toad-like hand in his.
“Her Highness is very glad to see you,” said an oily voice in French, but with a thick and rolling pronunciation that was South American unless it was Roumanian.
For once Lamberti did not notice the sensual, pink and white face, the hanging lips, the colourless brown hair, the insolent eyes, the effeminate figure and dress of the little man he detested, and whose mere touch was disgusting to him. By a strong effort he went directly up to the Princess without looking again at the young girl whose presence had affected him so oddly.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1014
