But there was more than that, much more. He had lived a clean life. She knew the world well enough now, and she knew what the lives of most unmarried men are at Castiglione’s age. Had she not a son to bring up, for whom she prayed daily that he might grow to manhood without reproach as well as without fear? She knew something of how men lived, and she could guess, as far as an honest woman may, at the daily temptations that must assail a good-looking young officer in the smartest cavalry regiment in the country; she guessed, too, that one who chose to live very differently from most of his comrades might not always escape jests which would not turn to actual ridicule only because Castiglione was not a man to be laughed at with impunity; not by any means.
She believed him, and though she might tell him that he was faithful to a sin, to something dangerously near a crime, his faith had been for her, and she could not deny it to herself. It was for her sake that he had not lived like the rest.
Then she covered her eyes with her hand and she saw her own past life clearly, and dared to look at it. The ugly blot was there, plain enough; but if the fault had really been all his, why should the stain look so very black after all those years? He believed that he had sinned against her, not with her; and so she had told herself — and had told him so with bitter reproaches before they had parted. Was it quite, quite true? If it was, she had no cause to reproach herself for the catastrophe. Yet since that hour she had accused herself daily. Of what? Of having loved Baldassare del Castiglione? But she had loved him innocently and dearly when she was seventeen, and ever since. Her mother had known it, but he was poor, he was no match for a girl who was something of an heiress. She had done as many other girls did and always will do; she had yielded to parental pressure, she had promised herself to forget, thinking it would be easy; she had married Montalto, making the great marriage of that season; she had begun to be a wife believing, poor soul, that she had done right in obeying her mother as a daughter should. But she had not forgotten.
Even that was no sin. It was her misfortune, and the natural consequence of a false system that sacrificed too much to money, or to money and name. She had actually been vain of marrying Montalto, for though he bore only the title of count, he was an authentic Count of the Empire, which is quite a different matter from being a Roman ‘conte.’ It had been a very great marriage indeed, and Maria had really been a little foolishly vain of becoming his wife. He had two historic castles in Italy as well as an historical palace in Rome and an historical estate on the Austrian frontier, and he was heir to historical lands in Spain by his mother; and he had a great number of historic ancestors who had been Counts of the Empire and Grandees of Spain, and hereditary Knights of the Sovereign Order of Malta. Everything about Montalto was historical, including his grave face and pointed black beard, and he might have passed for the original of more than one portrait in his historic gallery. His family even had a well-attested White Lady who appeared when one of them was going to die!
But all these things could not make the young wife forget Baldassare del Castiglione, who was only a more or less penniless officer in the Piedmont Lancers. The worst of it was that Montalto liked him, instinctively because his name was also so extremely historical, and fatally because husbands are the last to discover their wives’ preferences. Montalto had thrown Maria and Castiglione together.
She had gone to confession again and again, for she had been brought up to be very devout. Her confessor told her each time that she must avoid the man she loved and pray to forget him. She answered that her husband liked him and constantly asked him to the house; that she could not beg Montalto to change his attitude towards a friend without giving a good reason; and that the only reason she had was that she loved Baldassare with all her heart, though she was told it was wrong now that she was married, and she prayed that she might forget him and love her husband. Her confessor, having ascertained by further questions that she and Castiglione had avowed their love for each other in bygone days, long before her marriage, bade her appeal to the young man’s generosity, and beg him to refuse Montalto’s constant invitations and to see her as little as possible. But the confessor did not know the man. Maria followed the priest’s advice, but Baldassare utterly refused to do what she asked, and became more and more unmanageable from that day. Surely that was not her fault. It was not with this that she reproached herself. She had been afraid to tell Montalto, that was true; there had been one day, at last, when she should have confessed to him, instead of to the priest; she should have thrown herself upon his mercy and implored him to take her away. But then she had lacked courage. She had told herself that her husband loved her devotedly in his silent, respectful way, and that to tell him the truth would be the ruin of his happiness. She felt so sure that his honour was safe! And meanwhile Castiglione grew more passionate every day, more reckless and more uncontrollable; and she loved him the more, and he knew it, though she would not tell him so. She accused herself of that. She should have gone to her husband for protection, for his happiness was far less to him then than his honour. Some women would have invented an untruth as a means justified by the end. Maria might have told Montalto that she was suffering a persecution odious to her; she would have saved her husband’s honour and happiness together, and would even have raised her higher in his esteem. But she could not do it. It would be base, treacherous, and faithless. So she waited and prayed against her heart, and hoped against Castiglione’s nature. Then came the evil hour and it was too late; too late even to lie. She accused herself of having put off too long the one act that could have saved her. But still, and to the end, she had told herself that she had been strong, that she had resisted her own passion as well as the ruthless man who loved her. She had been innocent, she repeated; and she had told her confessor nothing more until she believed that she had changed, and that she hated the man she had loved so well. Then the priest, who was not worldly wise, warned her gently against anything so un-Christian as hatred, and counselled her to forget and to grow indifferent and to devote herself to her husband’s happiness. That sounded very easy to the poor priest.
After that she had altogether given up asking advice of him, and she had let herself be guided by her own sense of honour. Besides, the day soon came when Montalto accused her; and he would not have believed her if she had thrown the whole blame on her lover, for she could not lie and say she had never loved him. So she had not defended herself, and the great wave had gone over her head, and her husband, broken-hearted, had left her for ever; but he had done it in such a way that there had been no open scandal. He had gone to Spain and had come back again, and had gone away again and had stayed longer; he had spoken to his friends of his mother’s wretched health; she could not live in Italy, and Maria could not live in Spain, and he could not be in both places at once. The separation, so far as the world saw it, came by degrees, till it was permanent. Montalto and his wife were not the first couple that had separated quietly, without quarrelling in public, simply because they did not like each other. People did not always know where Maria spent her summers with her child, and the good-natured ones used to say that she saw her husband then; and she lived in such a way in Rome that the blame was all laid on Montalto, and Teresa Crescenzi’s story was believed. Montalto was a brute, who had often struck his wife when he was in one of his fits of anger, and she was little less than a saint.
Castiglione sat waiting for his answer. Would she tell him that he might come back and live near her? Or would she grow hard and cold once more, and bid him go away again, and for ever?
After a long time she raised her head and looked at him quietly.
‘I cannot answer you at once,’ she said; ‘but I promise that I will. You said yesterday that you had a fortnight’s leave. When I have made up my mind what to do I shall let you know, and you must come and see me again.’
Castiglione shook his head gravely and said nothing.
‘What is the matter?’ asked Maria.
‘I suppose you a
re going to ask advice of your confessor,’ he answered very sadly, and not at all in contempt.
But Maria lifted her head proudly.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I am going to ask myself what is right. And in my thoughts my child shall be the man I hope to make him, and I will ask him what is honourable.’
‘Will you not trust me for that?’ Castiglione asked, and his face lightened.
‘That I even consent to ask myself shows that I trust you more than I did when you surprised me here not half an hour ago. And now please leave me, for I want to be alone. Perhaps I shall send for you to-morrow, or perhaps not for a week. If we chance to meet anywhere, come and speak to me, for people will think it strange if we avoid each other. But I shall ask you to come here for the answer to your question.’
‘Thank you,’ he answered gratefully.
Their hands touched each other for a moment, but neither spoke again, and he went quietly out.
CHAPTER III
MARIA DID NOT send for Castiglione the next day, nor during a number of days afterwards, and Giuliana Parenzo saw that she was very much preoccupied and was not looking well. The elder woman was far too good a friend to ask questions, and when the two were together she did her best to amuse Maria by her talk. The Marchesa was not particularly witty, but she sometimes told a story with little touches of humour that were quite her own. Very good women are rarely witty, but they often have a happy faculty of seeing the funny side of things. Wit wounds, but humour disarms.
Giuliana saw, too, that Maria did not like to be alone, even with Leone. The truth was that she slept little and was very nervous. Something had come back from the past to haunt her; often a nameless horror came near her, not at night only, for it was not the fear of an overwrought imagination, but in broad daylight too, when she was alone and chanced to be doing nothing. It was the more dreadful because she could not define it; she could not say that it was caused by the question Castiglione had asked her, and which she had promised to answer, but when she thought of that her mind refused to be reasonable, and the horror came upon her, and she felt that utter ruin was close at hand, lying in wait for her. She remembered the sensation well in the old days; she had sometimes fancied then that she was going mad, and had made great efforts to control herself, but she had never thought of asking a doctor what it was, for she had believed, and believed now, that it was a state of mind rather than the mere effect of anxiety and mental fatigue on her body. So she suffered much, and quite uselessly; but that was a small matter compared with the fact that she had promised Castiglione an answer before his fortnight’s leave was over, and that after several days she was no nearer to finding one than when he had left her.
Again and again she thought of telling Giuliana all her trouble and asking her advice, but she was always deterred by an inward conviction that her friend would not understand. She was mistaken in this, but she could not believe that she was. Giuliana knew something, of course; all Rome believed Teresa Crescenzi’s story, of which the starting-point was that she had loved Baldassare del Castiglione innocently, and it was Giuliana who had repeated the tale to her. Maria had shaken her head, and had answered that there was not much truth in it, but that people might as well believe it as invent any other story, since she would never tell any one, not even Giuliana, exactly what had happened.
‘It does not concern me only,’ she had said gravely.
Giuliana had asked no questions, and Maria had been sure that there would never be any need of referring to her secret again.
But now the past had come back to ask a question which she could not answer. She had been in earnest when she had told Baldassare proudly that she did not mean to go to a priest for advice. He disliked all priests out of prejudice, as she knew. There might be good and bad soldiers, lawyers, writers, artists, or workmen, but in his estimation there could be very few good priests. Yet it was not to please him that she had said she would not go to her confessor; it was simply because she was quite sure that she could trust her own conscience and her own sense of honour to show her the right way; and perhaps she might have trusted both if her nerves had not failed her at the critical moment and left her apparently helpless. She was in great need of help and advice, and did not know where to go for either.
Meanwhile she had not met Castiglione again. The season was over, and even at its height she did not go out much. Society is always dull when one has no object in joining in its inane revels — love, ambition, stupid vanity, or a daughter to marry — unless, indeed, one possesses the temperament of a butterfly combined with the intelligence of an oyster. So it had been quite natural that Maria should not have met Castiglione during those days, and she had not chanced to meet him in the street. On his side, he had kept away from the part of the city in which she lived, but he had gone to every friend’s house and public place where he thought there was a possibility of meeting her.
After a week they met by what seemed an accident to them both. Maria was almost ill, and could no longer bear her trouble without some help. There was in Rome a good priest of her own class — a man in ten thousand, a man of heart, a man of courage, a man of the highest honour and of the purest life. If she had not always disliked the idea of meeting her confessor in the world, she would have chosen this man for hers long ago. If he had been in Rome in the darkest months of her life she would certainly have gone to him for advice; but he had then been working as a parish priest in a remote and fever-stricken part of the Maremma, and it was because his health had broken down that he had been obliged to give up his labours and come back to Rome. He was now a Canon of Saint Peter’s, and was employed as Secretary to the Cardinal Vicar, but found time to occupy himself with matters nearer to his heart. His name was Monsignor Ippolito Saracinesca; he was the second son of Don Giovanni, the head of the great family, and he was about forty years old.
To him Maria Montalto determined to go in her extremity. She was not quite sure how she should tell him her story, but for the sake of what she had said to Castiglione she would not put it in the form of a confession. She would not need to tell so much of it but that she could lay it before him as an imaginary case — which is a foolish device when it is meant to hide a secret, but is useful as a means of communicating one that is hard to tell.
Monsignor Saracinesca was generally at Saint Peter’s at about eleven o’clock, and Maria made sure of finding him there by telephoning to the Saracinesca palace, in which he had a small apartment of his own. At half-past ten she left her house alone, took a cab and drove across Rome to the Basilica. She got out at the front and went up the steps, for she had never before been to see any one in the Sacristy, and was not quite sure of what would happen if she went directly to it at the back of the church.
She entered on the right-hand side, by force of habit. There is a very heavy wadded leathern curtain there, and she had to pull it aside for herself, which was not easy. Just as she was doing this, and using all her strength, some one pushed the curtain up easily from within, and she found herself face to face with Baldassare del Castiglione, and very near him. She started violently, for she was even more nervous than usual. He himself was so much surprised that he drew his head back quickly; then he bent it silently and stood aside, holding up the curtain for her to pass, as if not expecting that she would stop to speak to him.
‘Thank you,’ she said, going in.
She tried to smile a little, just as much as one might with a word of thanks; but the effort was so great, and her face was so pale and disturbed, that it made a painful impression on him, and he watched her anxiously till she had gone a few steps forward into the church, for he was really afraid that she might faint and fall, and perhaps hurt herself, and there was no one near the door just then to help her.
But she walked straight enough, and he had just begun to lower the heavy curtain, turning his head as he passed under it, when he heard her call him sharply.
‘Balduccio!’
It was very long since she h
ad called him familiarly by his first name, and his heart stood still at the sound of her voice. A moment later he was within the church, and met her as she was coming back to the door.
‘You called me?’
‘Yes.’
They turned to the right into the north aisle, and walked slowly forwards, side by side. There were not many people in the Basilica at that hour, for it was a week-day, and the season of the tourists was almost over. At some distance before them, two or three people were kneeling before the closed gate of the Julian Chapel. Maria and Castiglione were as much alone as if they had been in the country, and as free to talk, for no conversation, even in an ordinary tone, can be heard far in the great cathedral. Nevertheless Maria did not speak.
‘You are ill,’ Castiglione said, breaking the silence at last. ‘Let me take you to your carriage.’
‘No. I came here for a good purpose, and I cannot go home without doing what I mean to do.’
‘I wish with all my heart that I had not come back to Rome to disturb your peace! It is my fault that you are suffering.’
‘No. It is not your fault.’ She spoke gently. ‘It is a consequence, that’s all. You had a right to ask me that question, and you have a right to an answer. But I cannot find one. That is what is troubling me.’
‘You are kind to me,’ said Castiglione. ‘Too kind,’ he added, and she knew by his tone how much he was moved.
She turned in her walk before she answered, for they were already near the Julian Chapel.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1135
