“Take that thing away, Doudou!” she cried nervously. “Pick it up with the tongs and burn it. He has the influenza! I am sure I have caught it!”
Monsieur Leroy obeyed, while she retired to her own room to spend half an hour in those various measures of disinfection which prophylactic medicine has recently taught timid people. She had caused her maid to telephone to Guido not to send any more notes until he was quite well.
“You must not go near him for a week, Doudou,” she said when she came back at last, feeling herself comparatively safe. “But you may ask how he is by telephone every morning. I do not believe there can be any danger in that.”
Electricity was a mysterious power after all, and seemed infinitely harder to understand than the ways of the supernatural beings with whom Monsieur Leroy placed her in daily communication. She had heard a celebrated man of science say that he himself was not quite sure what electricity might or might not do since the discovery of the X-rays.
Her precautions had the effect of cutting off communication between her and her nephew until her departure from Rome, which took place in the course of a few days, considerably to the relief of the Countess, who did not wish to meet her after what had passed.
Monsieur Leroy could not make up his mind to go and see the lawyer again in order to stop any proceedings which the latter might be already taking. Below his wish to serve the Princess and his hope of profiting by his success, there lay his deep-rooted and unreasoning jealousy of Guido d’Este, which he had never before seen any safe chance of gratifying. It would be a profound satisfaction to see this man, who was the mirror of honour, driven to extremities to escape disgrace. Another element in his decision, if it could be called that, was the hopeless disorder of his degenerate intelligence, which made it far easier for him to allow anything he had done to bear fruit, to the last consequence, than to make a second effort in order to arrest the growth of evil.
The lawyer was at work, silently and skilfully, and in a few days Princess Anatolie and Monsieur Leroy were comfortably established in her place in Styria, where the air was delightfully cool.
What was left of society in Rome learned with a little surprise, but without much regret, that the wedding was put off, and those who had country places not far from the city, and had already gone out to them for the summer, were delighted to know that they would not be expected to come into town for the marriage during the great heat. No date had ever been really fixed for it, and there was therefore no matter for gossip or discussion. The only persons who knew that Cecilia had made an attempt to break it off altogether were those most nearly concerned.
The Countess and Cecilia made preparations for going away, and the dressmakers and other tradespeople breathed more freely when they were told that they need not hurry themselves any longer.
But Cecilia had no intention of leaving without having seen Guido more than once again, hard as it might be for her to face him. Lamberti had written to her mother that he accepted Cecilia’s decision gladly, and hoped to be out of his room in a few days, but that he did not appear to be recovering fast. He did not seem to be so strong as his friend had thought, and the short illness, together with the mental shock of Cecilia’s letter, had made him very weak. The news of him was much the same for three days, and the young girl grew anxious. She knew that Lamberti spent most of his time with Guido, but he had not been to the Palazzo Massimo since his interview with her. She wished she could see him and ask questions, if only he could temporarily be turned into some one else; but since that was impossible, she was glad that he did not come to the house. She spent long hours in reading, while Petersen and the servants made preparations for the journey, and she wrote a line to Guido every day, to tell him how sorry she was for him. She received grateful notes from him, so badly written that she could hardly read them.
On the fourth day, no answer came, but Lamberti sent her mother a line an hour later to say that Guido had more fever than usual and could not write that morning, but was in no danger, as far as the doctor could say.
“I should like to go and see him,” Cecilia said. “He is very ill, and it is my fault.”
The Countess was horrified at the suggestion.
“My dear child,” she cried, “you are quite mad! Why, the poor man is in bed, of course!”
“I hope so,” Cecilia answered unmoved. “But Signor Lamberti could carry him to his sitting room.”
“Who ever heard of such a thing!”
“We could go in a cab, with thick veils,” Cecilia continued. “No one would ever know.”
“Think of Petersen, my dear! Women of our class do not wear thick veils in the street. For heaven’s sake put this absurd idea out of your head.”
“It does not seem absurd to me.”
“Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” retorted the Countess, losing her temper. “You do not even mean to marry him, and yet you talk of going to see him when he is ill, as if he were already your husband!”
“What if he dies?” Cecilia asked suddenly.
“There will be time enough to think about it then,” answered the Countess, with insufficient reflection. “Besides he is not going to die of a touch of influenza.”
“Signor Lamberti says he is very ill. Several people died of it last winter, you know. I suppose you mean that I need not think of trying to see him until we hear that there is no hope for him.”
“Well?”
“That might be too late. He might not know me. It seems to me that it would be better to try and save his life, or if he is not in real danger, to help him to get well.”
“If you insist upon it,” said the Countess, “I will go and see him myself and take a message from you. I suppose that nobody could find anything serious to say against me for it, though, really — I am not so old as that, am I?”
“I think every one would think it was very kind of you to go and see him.”
“Do you? Well — perhaps — I am not sure. I never did such a thing in my life. I am sure I should feel most uncomfortable when I found myself in a young man’s rooms. We had better send him some jelly and beef-tea. A bachelor can never get those things.”
“It would not be the same as if I could see him,” said Cecilia, mildly.
Her mother did not like to admit this proposition, and disappeared soon afterward. Without telling her daughter, she wrote an urgent note to Lamberti begging him to come and dine and tell them all about Guido’s illness, as she and Cecilia were very anxious about him.
Cecilia went out alone with Petersen late in the hot afternoon. She wished she could have walked the length of Rome and back, but her companion was not equal to any such effort in the heat, so the two got into a cab. She did not like to drive with her maid in her own carriage, simply because she had never done it. For the first time in her life she wished she were a man, free to go alone where she pleased, and when she pleased. She could be alone in the house, but nowhere out of doors, unless she went to the villa, and she was determined not to go there again before leaving Rome. It had disagreeable associations, since she had been obliged to sit on the bench by the fountain with Guido a few days ago. She remembered, too, that at the very moment when his paternal warning not to catch cold had annoyed her, he had probably caught cold himself, and she did not know why this lowered him a little in her estimation, but it did. She was ashamed to think that such a trifle might have helped to make her write the letter which had hurt him so much.
She went to the Forum, for there she could make Petersen sit down, and could walk about a little, and nobody would care, because she should meet no one she knew.
As they went down the broad way inside the wicket at which the tickets are sold, she saw a party of tourists on their way to the House of the Vestals. Of late years both Germans and Americans have discovered that Rome is not so hot in summer as the English all say it is, and that fever does not lurk behind every wall to spring upon the defenceless foreigner.
The tourists were
of the usual class, and Cecilia was annoyed to find them where she had hoped to be alone; but they would soon go away, and she sat down with Petersen to wait for their going, under the shadow of the temple of Castor and Pollux. Petersen began to read her guide-book, and the young girl fell to thinking while she pushed a little stone from side to side with the point of her parasol, trying to bring it each time to the exact spot on which it had lain before.
She was thinking of all that had happened to her since she left Petersen in that same place on the May morning that seemed left behind in another existence, and she was wondering whether she would go back to that point, if she could, and live the months over again; or whether, if the return were possible, she would have made the rest different from what it had been.
It would have been so much easier to go on loving the man in the dream to the end of her life, meeting him again and again in the old surroundings that were more familiar to her than those in which she lived. It would have been so much better to be always her fancied self, to be the faithful Vestal, leading the man she loved by sure degrees to heights of immaterial blessedness in that cool outer firmament where sight and hearing and feeling, and thinking and loving, were all merged in a universal consciousness. It would have been so much easier not to love a real man, above all not to love one who never could love her, come what might. And besides, if all that had gone on, she would never have brought disappointment and suffering upon Guido d’Este.
She decided that it would have been preferable, by far, to have gone on with her life of dreams, and when awake to have been as she had always known herself, in love with everything that made her think and with nothing that made her feel.
But in the very moment when the matter seemed decided, she remembered how she had looked into Lamberti’s eyes three nights ago, and had felt something more delicious than all thinking while she told him how she loved that other man, who was himself. That one moment had seemed worth an age of dreams and a lifetime of visions, and for it she knew that she would give them all, again and again.
The point of the parasol did not move now, but lay against the little stone, just where she was looking, for she was no longer weighing anything in her mind nor answering reasons with reasons. With the realisation of fact, came quickly the infinite regret and longing she knew so well, yet which always consoled her a little. She had a right to love as she did, since she was to suffer by it all her life. If she had thrown over Guido d’Este to marry Lamberti, there would have been something guilty in loving him. But there was not. She was perfectly disinterested, absolutely without one thought for her own happiness, and if she had done wrong she had done it unconsciously and was going to pay the penalty with the fullest consciousness of its keenness.
The tourists trooped back, grinding the path with their heavy shoes, hot, dusty, tired, and persevering, as all good tourists are. They stared at her when they thought she was not watching them, for they were simple and discreet souls, bent on improving themselves, and though they despised her a little for not toiling like themselves, they saw that she was beautiful and cool and quiet, sitting there in the shade, in her light summer frock, and her white gloves, and her Paris hat, and the men admired her as a superior being, who might be an angel or a demon, while all the women envied her to the verge of hatred; and because she was accompanied by such an evidently respectable person as Peterson was, they could not even say that she was probably an actress. This distressed them very much.
Kant says somewhere that when a man turns from argument and appeals to mankind’s common sense, it is a sure sign that his reasoning is worthless. Similarly, when women can find nothing reasonable to say against a fellow-woman who is pretty and well dressed, they generally say that she looks like an actress; and this means according to the customs of a hundred years ago, which women seem to remember though most men have forgotten them, that she is an excommunicated person not fit to be buried like a Christian. Really, they could hardly say more in a single word.
When the tourists were at a safe distance Cecilia rose, bidding Petersen sit still, and she went slowly on towards the House of the Vestals, and up the little inclined wooden bridge which at that time led up to it, till she stood within the court, her hand resting almost on the very spot where it had been when Lamberti had come upon her in the spring morning.
Her memories rose and her thoughts flashed back with them through ages, giving the ruined house its early beauty again, out of her own youth. She was not dreaming now, but she knew instinctively how it had been in those last days of the Vestals’ existence, and wished every pillar, and angle, and cornice, and ornament back, each into its own place and unchanged, and herself, where she was, in full consciousness of life and thought, at the very moment when she had first seen the man’s face and had understood that one may vow away the dying body but not the deathless soul. That had been the beginning of her being alive. Before that, she had been as a flower, growing by the universal will, one of those things that are created pure and beautiful and fragrant from the first without thought or merit of their own; and then, as a young bird in the nest, high in air, in a deep forest, in early summer, looking out and wondering, but not knowing yet, its little heart beating fast with only one instinct, to be out and alone on the wing. But afterwards all had changed instantly and knowledge had come without learning, because what was to make it was already present in subtle elements that needed only the first breath of understanding to unite themselves in an ordered and perfect meaning; as the electric spark, striking through invisible mingled gases, makes perfect union of them in crystal drops of water.
That had been the beginning, since conscious life begins in the very instant when the soul is first knowingly answerable for the whole being’s actions, in the light of good and evil, and first asks the only three questions which human reason has never wholly answered, which are as to knowledge, and duty, and hope.
Who shall say that life, in that sense, may not begin in a dream, as well as in what we call reality? What is a dream? Sometimes a wandering through a maze of absurdities, in which we feel as madmen must, believing ourselves to be other beings than ourselves, conceiving the laws of nature to be reversed for our advantage or our ruin, seeing right as wrong and wrong as right, in the pathetic innocence of the idiot or the senseless rage of the maniac, convinced beyond all argument that the absolutely impossible is happening before our eyes, yet never in the least astonished by any wonders, though subject to terrors we never feel when we are awake. Has no one ever understood that confused dreaming must be exactly like the mental state of the insane, and that if we dreamed such dreams with open eyes, we should be raving mad, or hopelessly idiotic? It is true, whether any one has ever said so or not. Inanimate things turn into living creatures, the chair we sit on becomes a horse, the arm-chair is turned into a wild beast; and we ride a-hunting through endless drawing-rooms which are full of trees and undergrowth, till the trees are suddenly people and are all dancing and laughing at us, because we have come to the ball in attire so exceedingly scanty that we wonder how the servants could have let us in. And in the midst of all this, when we are frantically searching for our clothes, and for a railway ticket, which we are sure is in the right-hand pocket of the waistcoat, if only we could find it, and if some one would tell us from which side of the station the train starts, and we wish we had not forgotten to eat something, and had not unpacked all our luggage and scattered everything about the railway refreshment room, and that some kind person would tell us where our money is, and that another would take a few of the fifty things we are trying to hold in our hands without dropping any of them; in the midst of all this, I say, a dead man we knew comes from his grave and stares at us, and asks why we cruelly let him die, long ago, without saying that one word which would have meant joy or despair to him at the last moment. Then our hair stands up and our teeth chatter, because the secret of the soul has risen against us where we least expected it; and we wake alone in the dark with the memory of the de
ad.
Is not that madness? What else can madness be but that disjointing of ordered facts into dim and disorderly fiction, pierced here and there by lingering lights of memory and reason? All of us sometimes go mad in our sleep. But it does not follow that in dreaming we are not sometimes sane, rational, responsible, our own selves, good or bad, doing and saying things which we might say and do in real life, but which we have never said nor done, incurring the consequences of our words and deeds as if they were actual, keeping good faith or breaking it, according to our own natures, accomplishing by effort, or failing through indolence, as the case may be, blushing with genuine shame, laughing with genuine mirth, and burning with genuine anger; and all this may go on from the beginning to the end of the dream, without a single moment of impossibility, without one incident which would surprise us in the waking state. With most people dreams of this kind are rare, but every one who dreams at all must have had them once or twice in life.
If we are therefore sometimes sane in dreams we can remember, and act in them as we really should, according to our individual consciences and possessed of our usual intelligence and knowledge, it cannot be denied that a series of such imaginary actions constitutes a real experience, during which we have risen or fallen, according as we have thought or acted. Some dreams of this kind leave impressions as lasting as that made by any reality. The merit or fault is wholly fictitious, no doubt, because although we have fancied that we could exercise our free will, we were powerless to use it; but the experience gained is not imaginary, where the dream has been strictly sane, any more than thought, in the abstract, is fictitious because it is not action. People of some imagination can easily, while wide awake, imagine a series of actions and decide rationally what course they would pursue in each, and such decisions constitute undoubted experience, which may materially affect the conduct of the individual if cases similar to the fancied ones present themselves in life. When there is no time to be lost, the instantaneous recollection of a train of reasoning may often mean instant decision, followed by immediate action, upon which the most important consequences may follow.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1037
