Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Her gaze was fixed upon the lovely frescoed head, with its glory of golden hair and its look of heavenly innocence. But she did not see it; she was thinking that if she did right she must tell Castiglione never to come back, and that the aching, lonely life that had seemed once more so full for a brief space was to begin again to-morrow, and was to last until she died. And she was thinking that her husband might come back.

  Monsignor Saracinesca waited quietly after she had spoken, for since she admitted the truth of what he urged he felt that there was nothing more to say. After a little while Maria collected her strength for the effort and rose from her seat, still resting one hand on the great table.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You have been very kind. All you have told me is true. I shall try to follow your advice.’

  ‘I hope you will,’ answered the Churchman. ‘You will not find it so hard as you think.’

  She smiled faintly, as gentle people do sometimes when they are in great pain and well-disposed persons tell them that suffering is all a matter of imagination.

  ‘Oh, no!’ she answered. ‘I shall find it very, very hard.’

  The grey-haired man sighed and smiled at her so sadly and kindly that she felt herself drawn to him even more than before. She was standing close to him now, and looked up trustfully to his spiritual face and deeply thoughtful eyes.

  ‘I did not know I loved him so much till he came back,’ she said simply. ‘How could I? I did not guess that I had forgiven him long ago!’

  ‘Poor child! God help you!’

  ‘I need help.’ She was silent for a moment, and then looked down. ‘Do you write to my husband?’ she asked timidly.

  ‘Sometimes. I have little time for writing letters. Should you like to send him any message?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she cried in a startled tone. ‘But oh, if you write to him, don’t urge him to come back! Don’t make him think it is his duty. It cannot be his duty to make any one so unhappy as I should be!’

  ‘I shall not give him any advice whatever unless he asks for it,’ replied Don Ippolito, ‘and if he does, I shall answer that I think he should write to you directly, for I would rather not try to act as his adviser. I told you that he did not take my advice the first time.’

  ‘Yes — but — you have been so kind! Would you tell me what you wished him to do then?’

  The priest thought a moment.

  ‘I cannot tell you that,’ he said presently.

  Maria looked surprised, and shrank back a little, suspecting that he had suggested some course which might have offended or hurt her. He understood intuitively.

  ‘It would be a betrayal of confidence to Montalto,’ he added, ‘to tell you what I advised him, and what he did not do. But I still think it would have been better for both of you if he had done it.’

  Maria looked puzzled.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, in a tone from which there was no appeal, ‘but I cannot tell you.’

  She looked at him a little hardly at first; then she remembered what every one in Rome knew, that the delicate, shadow-like man with the clear brown eyes had risked being tried for murder when he was a young priest rather than betray a confession which had been anything but formal. Her tired face softened as she thought of that.

  ‘I am sorry I asked you,’ she said. ‘I did not mean to be inquisitive.’

  ‘It was natural that you should ask the question,’ he answered, ‘but it would not have been quite honourable in me to answer it.’

  ‘I trust you all the more because you refused me,’ she said. ‘And now I must be going, for I have kept you a long time.’

  ‘Scarcely a quarter of an hour.’ He smiled as he glanced at the hideous modern clock on the table.

  She left him after thanking him and pressing his thin, kindly hand, and she made her way back to the church, feeling a little faint.

  When she was gone Monsignor Saracinesca returned to the question of the picture which was to be hung, but for a while he could not give it all the attention that a beautiful Hans Memling deserved. He was thinking of what he had said to Maria, and not only of that, but of what he had said to Baldassare del Castiglione a quarter of an hour earlier.

  For that was the coincidence which had brought the two together that morning at the door of the church. Castiglione had taken it into his head to see Don Ippolito on the same day; like Maria, he had telephoned to the palace and had learned that his old acquaintance was usually to be found in the Sacristy about eleven; being a soldier, he had gone punctually at the hour, whereas Maria had not arrived till fifteen or twenty minutes later, and it was therefore almost a certainty that they should meet.

  It had not been easy for Don Ippolito, taken by surprise as he was. But Castiglione had put his case as one man of honour may to another, and had told as much of the truth as he might without casting the least slur on Maria’s good name. He had loved her before her marriage, he had said; he loved her still. After she had been married he had left her no peace, and Montalto had made him the reason for leaving her. She had bidden him, Castiglione, to go away and never see her again. He had so far obeyed as to stay away several years. He had come back at last to ask her forgiveness; he was not sure of obtaining it — he had not yet met her in the church — but he came to Don Ippolito as a friend. His love for Maria was great, he said, but even if she forgave him, he would never see her again rather than be the cause of any further trouble or anxiety to her. What did Don Ippolito think? Don Ippolito considered the matter for a few minutes, and then said that in his opinion any renewal of friendly intercourse between Castiglione and the Countess would surely bring trouble and would inevitably cause her anxiety. If Castiglione loved her in the way he believed he did, he would think more of her welfare than of the pleasure he would have in seeing her. If he was sure that his thoughts of her were what he represented them to be, he could write to her, and she might write to him if she thought fit. The prelate refused to say more than that, but the opinion was delivered in such manly and direct words that Castiglione was much impressed by it; and when, in the church, he had generously offered to leave Rome at once, because he saw in Maria’s face all the trouble and anxiety he feared for her, he had spoken with Ippolito Saracinesca’s honourable words still ringing in his ears. It was no wonder if he told Maria that she could not have chosen a better man of whom to ask help and advice; and though he knew what that advice would be, and felt sorrowfully sure that she would try to follow it, he almost smiled at the coincidence as he watched her cross the nave in the direction of the Sacristy.

  And now, when she came back into the Basilica, she retraced her steps towards the tomb of Leo Twelfth. Again she stopped a moment and almost knelt as she passed before the Julian Chapel and went on to the north aisle; but when the small gate before which she had knelt with Castiglione was in sight she paused in the shadow of the pillar and leant against the marble, as if she were very tired.

  Till then she had not dared to ask herself what she meant to do, but when she saw the place where she had so lately touched Castiglione’s hand in forgiveness of the past, the truth rushed back upon her, as the winter’s tide turns from the ebb to storm upon the beaten shore.

  It was upon her, and she felt that it would sweep her from her feet and drown her; and it was not the imaged truth she had taught herself to believe those many years. She gazed at the closed gate, and she knew why she had forgiven her lover at last. It was because she wished to forgive herself, and she had found it easy, shamefully easy. The hour of evil came back to her memory with frightful vividness, and now her pale cheek burned with shame and she pressed it hard against the icy marble; and she forced her eyes to stay wide open, lest if she shut them for an instant, she should see what she remembered so horribly well.

  She would not go to the gate again, now; the words she had said there had been false and untrue, the prayer she had breathed there had been a blasphemy and nothing else. For years and years she had lived in the mortal sin of those
brief moments; unconfessing and unpardoned of God, she had gone to Communion month after month, telling herself that she was an innocent, suffering woman, doing her best to atone for another’s crime; yet she had always felt in the dark hiding-places of her heart the knowledge that it was all untrue, that she had been less sinned against than herself sinning, and that if she would die in the faith in which she had been brought up, and in the hope of life hereafter, she must some day humble herself and her pride to the earth, and ask of God and man the pardon she had granted just now as if it were hers to give.

  It was too much; it was more than she could bear. In her anger and hatred of herself she found strength to turn from the pillar and to go on straight and quickly to the door. Two or three soldiers who had wandered in were just leaving the Basilica; they lifted the heavy curtain for her and she thanked them mechanically and passed out, holding her head high.

  CHAPTER IV

  MARIA HARDLY KNEW how she had come home. She had no distinct recollection of having taken a cab, nor of having driven through the city, nor of having paid a cabman when she reached the Via San Martino. There are times when unconscious cerebration is quite enough for the ordinary needs of life. Maria neither fainted nor behaved in any unusual way during the half-hour that elapsed between her leaving the pillar against which she had leant in the church and the moment when she entered her own room. Even then she hardly knew that she gave her maid her hat and gloves and smoothed her hair before she went to her sitting-room to be alone.

  But when she was there, in her favourite seat with her little table full of books beside her, her footstool at her feet and her head resting at last against a small silk cushion on the back of the chair — then the one thought that had taken possession of her pronounced itself aloud in the quiet room.

  ‘I have been a very wicked woman.’

  That was all, and she said it aloud only once; but the words went on repeating themselves again and again in her brain, while she leaned back and stared steadily at the blank of the tinted ceiling; and for a time she turned her head wearily from side to side on the cushion, as people do who have little hope, and fear that the very worst is close at hand.

  For many years she had sustained a part which her pride had invented to quiet her conscience. If it were not so, if she had really been the outraged victim of a moment’s madness, knowing herself quite innocent, why had she not gone to her husband, as an honest woman should, to ask for protection and to demand justice? Because she loved Castiglione still, perhaps; because she was willing to sacrifice everything rather than accuse him; because she would rather be dishonoured in her husband’s eyes than see her lover disgraced before the world. But that was not true; that was impossible. If Baldassare del Castiglione had been the wretch she had the courage to tell him he was when she bade him leave her for ever, Maria Montalto would not have hesitated an instant. He should have gone where justice sends such men, and she would have asked her husband to let her end her days out of the sight of the world she had known.

  Her memory brought back the words she had spoken to Castiglione long ago under the ilex-trees in the Villa Borghese. She remembered the intonations of her own voice, she remembered how she had quivered with pain and anger while she spoke, how she had turned and left him there, leaning against a tree, very pale; for she had made him believe all she said, and that was the worst a woman can say. She had called him a coward and a brute, the basest of mankind; and he had obeyed her, and had left Rome that night because she had made him believe her.

  But later, many months later, when Montalto solemnly accused her of having betrayed him, she had bent her head, and not one word of self-defence had risen to her lips; so her husband had turned away and left her, as she had turned and left her lover. He had been under the same roof with her after that, at more and more distant intervals till he had left Rome altogether; but never again, when they had been alone together, had he spoken one word to her except for necessity. Yet he had loved her then, and he loved her still; she had seen in his face that he was broken-hearted, and Monsignor Saracinesca had told her now that the deep hurt would not heal. She had played her comedy of innocence to her lover and to herself, but she had not dared to play it to her husband, lest some act of frightful injustice should be done to Baldassare del Castiglione.

  She had forgiven Balduccio! She laughed at the thought now in bitter self-contempt. Her soul and her conscience had met face to face in the storm, and the expiation had begun. She must confess her fault to God and man, but first to man, first to that man to whom it would be most hard to tell the truth because she had been the most unjust to him, to Castiglione himself.

  That was to be the answer to his question. There was no doubt now; he must go away. She could not allow him to exchange again into another regiment, in order that he might live near her for a time, nor could she let him leave the service altogether, to pass an idle life in Rome. Every word that Don Ippolito had spoken was unanswerable, and there was much more that he had not said. She might not be able to trust herself after all; after reconciliation, friendship would come, cool, smiling and self-satisfied, but behind friendship there was a love that neither could hide long, and beyond love there was human passion, strong and wakeful, with burning eyes and restless hands, waiting till the devil opportunity should come suddenly and spread his dusky wings as a tent and a shelter for sin. Maria was still brave enough to fear that, and something told her that fear of herself must be the first step on which to rise above herself.

  She left her seat at last and sat down at a table to write to Castiglione; but when she tried to word a note it was not easy. It would not be wise, either, for such words as she wished to send him are better not written down. Maria realised this before she had penned three lines, and she tore the bit of paper to shreds at once. Baldassare was stopping with cousins, and a note might fall into light-fingered hands.

  She rang the bell and told Agostino to telephone to the Conte del Castiglione saying that she would be glad to see him the next day at half-past two, if he could come then. In a few moments the servant brought back the answer. The Conte had been at the telephone himself and would do himself the honour of calling on the Signora Contessa on the morrow at half-past two.

  The formal reply was so like his messages of old days that it sent a little thrill through her. Often and often he had come at that quiet hour, when Montalto was always out of the way, and each time he had found some new way of telling her that he loved her; and she, in turn, had listened and had laughingly scolded him, telling him that she had grown from a silly girl into a grave Roman matron, and would have no more of his boyish love-making; and, moreover, that if he was always going to make love to her she would refuse to receive him the very next time he tried to see her at the hour when she was alone. And yet she listened to his voice, and he saw her lip quiver sometimes and her soft pallor grow warmer; and always, when he sent a message asking to see her at half-past two, the answer had been that she would probably be at home, and that he might try if he liked; and when he came, she was there, and alone, and ready to laugh, and scold, and listen, expecting no danger and not wittingly thinking any evil.

  So his message to-day startled her senses, as a little accidental pressure on the scar of an old wound sometimes sends a wave of the forgotten pain through the injured nerve. It was like a warning.

  When she was alone she sat down in the deep chair again and leaned back. It was wrong to be so glad that she was to see him the next day, but she could not help it; and besides, it was to be the last time for so long, perhaps for ever. Surely, after all that she had suffered, she might allow herself that little joy before the unending separation began!

  She was already far from the bitter self-reproach of a few minutes ago, and the mere thought of his coming had wrought the change. Was it not in order to be just to him at last that she had sent for him? Might there not be a legitimate moral satisfaction in humbling herself before him, and in the thought that she was about to lift
a heavy burden from his heart? Moreover, to be for ever gloomily pondering on her past fault, now that she had acknowledged it and was sorry for it, would surely be morbid.

  As for the religious side of the matter, she would make her peace with heaven at once. She would put on a brown veil and go to the Capuchin church that very afternoon and confess all to Padre Bonaventura, of whom she had so often heard, but who would never know who she was. He would impose some grave and wearisome penance, no doubt; Capuchin monks are notably more severe in that respect than other confessors. He would perhaps bid her read the seven penitential psalms seven times, which would be a long affair. But he could not refuse her absolution since she was really so sorry; and the next morning she would get up early and go to the little oratory near by and receive the Communion in the spirit of truth at last; and when Castiglione came at half-past two she would have grace and strength to tell what she had to tell, and to bid him good-bye, even for ever. If she did all this she would earn the right to that one last little joy of meeting.

  She was not a saint yet; she was not even heroic, and perhaps what she took for a guiding ray of light was anything but that; perhaps it was little better than a will-o’-the-wisp that would lead her into far more dangerous ground than she had traversed yet. But after her resolution was made she felt lighter and happier, and better able to face the world than she had felt during that long week since Castiglione had come back.

  Then Leone came in, straight and sturdy and bright-eyed; and he marched across the room to where she sat and threw his arms around her, as he sometimes did. And though he was but a small boy, she felt how strong he was when he squeezed her to him with all his might and kissed her, first on one cheek and then on the other; and in spite of herself she closed her eyes for a second and drew one short breath as she kissed him too. He was very quick to see and notice everything.