“What became of that baron . . . and baroness . . . that he wrote about at first?” Piera inquired, gazing out over the dark, bright lake.
“He hasn’t mentioned them again,” said Laura, folding the letter carefully. “Oh dear, I wish . . .”
“What?”
“That I weren’t envious of him.”
Piera brooded over this for a while. It did not make much sense to her at first. Laura was Laura, and was here; Itale was Itale, and was there. Piera’s mind did not easily mix the absent with the present. Her imagination did not move lightly in and out of possibilities; so she was seldom envious, and seldom discontented. She was cautious about entering the realm of the possible, for when she did her will came with her.
“It really isn’t fair,” she said at last, “him getting all the excitement, and you none.”
“It isn’t the excitement. It’s just that he’s . . . doing something, being someone. I don’t get bored, it isn’t that.”
“I am so dreadfully bo-aaard,” Piera said nasally, imitating the eldest Sorentay daughter, and she and Laura both giggled.
“I never get bored. I just feel unnecessary. It’s what Itale says here about Mr Estenskar, that’s what I mean—” She already knew the sentence by heart: “‘He seeks with all his strength to find the way that he and only he can, and hence must, follow.’ So is Itale trying to do that. And he will do it. But anybody in the world could do everything I do.”
“Nobody else could be Laura Sorde, though.”
“What’s the use being me if I don’t do anything?”
“If you weren’t you what would I do? Who would I talk to? How could I even be me? Anybody can run around doing things, but nobody can be you except you. And I hope you never change.”
“I won’t change in what I love,” Laura said. Her face was turned to the western sunlight and the dark reflecting bulk of San Larenz Mountain above the lake. “But you see, you’re already in love, you’ve started on your way. . . . I haven’t. I have no way. I just wait and time goes by and by and by and life goes by. . . . Surely I was made for more?”
Piera did not answer for a while. She felt more than the three years’ age difference between herself and Laura, the very great difference between sixteen and nineteen years old; she felt an inferiority of character that had nothing to do with age. She was in love, Laura said. And indeed six weeks ago she and Alexander Sorentay had become secretly engaged, and she had rushed to tell Laura the secret and show her Alexander’s carnelian ring on a chain around her neck. That was so, that was true. But as Laura spoke Piera blushed as if she had been caught stealing jam. She was engaged to be married, but she did not, in her deep heart, take it seriously. Laura did. It would never occur to Laura that one might experiment with betrothal, or play at love—that one could even speak of being in love without having given one’s whole heart. The little girl felt Alexander’s carnelian ring a cold lump against her breastbone, and thought, “I’m a pig, I’m a pig, I’m a pig.”
“When you fall in love,” she said, “it’ll be with a tremendous man, a king. Nobody around here! A man from far away, a man like a lion, and you’ll go away with him and see, oh, I don’t know, Vienna and all the cities, and do wonderful things, and write letters home and I’ll be envious. . . .”
“Silly,” said Laura. “What would I leave Malafrena for? Let’s go to vespers at St Anthony’s, Peri.”
“Oh, Miss Elisabeth wanted to, I forgot. Come on!” Piera jumped up like a branch suddenly released; Laura uncurled and followed her. They left the letter with Eleonora, went by Valtorsa for the pony cart and the governess, and got to St Anthony’s barely in time for the service. There at the base of San Larenz the sunlight was long gone. The granite chapel looked like a toy set down between the forested ridge and the deep curve of the lake. Inside the chapel smelled of stone, whitewash, balsam, pine. The two girls, the fat, quiet governess, a young peasant couple, and three old women were all that evening’s congregation. They heard vespers in the silence of the lonely place, in the growing cold of the mountain evening. When they came out the far reaches of the lake were grey with dusk and the water in the shadow of San Larenz was streaked with a cold, strong, silent wind rising.
Laura and the priest, Father Klement of Sinviya, old friends, fell to talking, and there was a matter of arranging to have some firewood brought to the cottage of one of the old women, and then the priest came back with them in the pony cart for supper at the Sordes’, so that Piera and Miss Elisabeth got home rather late, delaying supper at Valtorsa by a few minutes. After supper Count Orlant, Miss Elisabeth, neighbor Rodenne, and the count’s new overseer played whist. Vist, it was called in the Montayna, and many autumn and winter evenings were given up to vist. Auntie sat in her straight-backed chair, a ball of red yarn on her lap. Piera sat by the marble fireplace with her lesson book. She was supposed to write a composition on the Duties of the Young Female. She hated to write compositions, or letters, or notes, or anything. They were always very dull, and then Miss Elisabeth made red circles around the misspellings. She had composed one sentence so far: “Young girls should be obeidient.”
“Auntie, would you like me to read to you?”
“No, my dear,” said Auntie, slowly, slowly rewinding the red yarn.
“Young girls should be obeidient.” Piera thought and thought. “They should not argue or talk very much loudly. Their are numierous things young girls should not do. But these are not duties.” Her pen made a row of dots on the paper, then of its own accord drew three profiles of young men with large eyes and noses, facing left, and a lion with a curly mane, facing right. “Young girls should get M and have B” she wrote very small and then crossed it out very black. “It is important for them to learn there lessons but less important than for young gentlemen to learn there’s as they will find them more useful in life. They should be neat and orderly.” The pen drew three maidens with Grecian noses all facing left. Piera gave it up and began to watch the card-players.
Her father had his cards up under his nose, not because he was suspicious, but because he was nearsighted. Neighbor Rodenne had a good hand and looked smug. He was a small landowner; vist and hunting were his passions, and he had never married, stating that a wife would keep him from vist and hunting. Miss Elisabeth looked, as usual, contented. She was a placid soul; nothing stirred her; she praised God with a mild heart. Next to her the new overseer, Gavrey, looked thin and sharp as a knifeblade. He was a Val Altesma man, and had been with Count Orlant only a month. Piera had not paid much attention to him, as he was always busy with papers and account books, speaking to her father but not to her, and missing dinner more often than not because he was working in the office or the orchards or the fields. He was sitting quiet now, alert, studying the other players’ faces; so Piera studied his. He was a good-looking man, thin-lipped, dark-eyed, with a ruddy brown complexion. The best thing about being engaged to Alexander, Piera thought, was that it gave her a safe refuge, a look-out tower, from which to look at other men.
Since she was twelve she had been trying to fall in love. It was hard work, falling in love with pictures, strangers glimpsed in Portacheyka, heroes of romantic novels, and the few boys she met who were not put out of the running by warts or stupidity. It was hard work and unrewarding. But she kept at it. She practiced: as a musician practices on his violin, not coldbloodedly, yet methodically, not for present profit or enjoyment, not because he longs to play each scale ten times over, but because to play the violin well is his gift, his need, his job. So Piera practiced at the art of love. She had known Alexander Sorentay all her life. No social event took place along the northern lake-shore without representatives from the Sorentay, Sorde, and Valtorskar families. In the last generation the latter two had got few in numbers, even to the point where the Valtorskar name would die with Piera; but the Sorentays abounded. There were never less than fifteen of them under the dynastic roof, northwest of Valtorsa in a flank valley of Sinviya Mountain. T
he senior family of the estate had six children, three girls and three boys, all tall and boisterous except the eldest, Alexander, who was short and quiet. He was Laura’s age, and when they were both sixteen he had written her a long love-letter embellished with quotations from The New Heloise (which his mother had borrowed from Eleonora the year before and forgotten to return). Laura had shown the letter almost at once to her mother, who counselled inaction. Nothing had come of it except a lasting embarrassment for both Laura and Alexander; at every party the memory of the letter lay like a tombstone between them. For three years they danced together at every dancing-party in stony and tormented silence. It was a great relief to Laura when she could hand Piera over to Alexander and do her dancing with Papa Sorentay, the uncles, the cousins, the brother-in-law, and the rest of the inexhaustible fund of Sorentays. This handing-over took place at the August ball, the ball they had discussed one July evening by the lake, the ball to which Piera wore a white gown with gold flowers embroidered down the bodice, her first evening gown. Alexander gawped at her as if he had never seen her. Indeed he never had. In her first evening gown Piera was new as the newborn, her childhood left behind, her womanhood fresh from the hands of God and the seamstress. By midnight Alexander had decided that if she would not marry him life was meaningless. Three weeks later, in the evening of a long, loud picnic day in the pine forest across the lake, he climaxed a spasmodic but earnest wooing with the offer of marriage. Piera accepted at once. “Yes,” she said. She was sitting on a fallen log near a stream. Alexander hovered about her, not daring either to kneel or sit down.
“May I speak to your father?” he said.
“Perhaps we should wait a while,” she said.
She gave no reason why, and he asked none. They agreed without discussion that the engagement should be kept secret; neither thought to ask why. They were in perfectly good faith. Alexander, experiencing real desire, never questioned that he was in love. Piera was more aware that they were playing a game, yet it was not a game to her; what she was playing was the moto perpetuo or the tarantella that follows the well-practiced scales; a beginner’s piece, but music. She did not know why he said he would marry her. She said she would marry him because she needed to practice her art. She scarcely thought about their getting married. They were engaged to be married: betrothed. That was enough, for the present. They deceived each other—Piera deceived him more than he did her—and they deceived themselves—he deceived himself more than Piera did herself. But they were quite happy. Piera looked up into Alexander’s blocky, callow face, and he looked down at her sitting on the log and said, “My bride!”
Later on he said, “Our properties touch, you know, at Galia’s Hill.”
He was the principal heir to the Sorentay property; Piera was the only heir to Valtorsa. The joined estates would be an excellent holding. Piera found it very interesting that he had seen this and thought about it; she admired him for doing so. Her father was an impractical man, inept at the management of his property and miserable when he had to deal with money matters. Guide Sorde was always trying to set him straight. But Guide, though a good farmer and manager, was not a practical man either; he loved the work, not the profit from it. Alexander saw the work neither as a punishment nor an end in itself, but as a means to an end. He preferred work in the estate office to the fields, and had been his father’s accountant for two years. All his talk of loss and profit, income and outlay, was quite new to Piera, and she listened with deep interest to all he told her. That intelligent interest, and her honest and unqualified admiration of his talents, soon won Alexander to her with a bond stronger, perhaps, than his desire.
The sweetest moment of it all for Piera was when she told Laura that she was betrothed. She felt triumph; Laura felt envy; but those were mere emotions, twinges, straw on the current of their friendship. Piera’s love-affair brightened Laura’s life, a life that ran too quiet and too solitary; while, without Laura, Piera would not have enjoyed her betrothal very much at all. Indeed she preferred talking about Alexander with Laura, to being with Alexander himself.
She did not see him often, as he could not call on her openly. She had requested secrecy, and a call from a young man on a young woman, in that small watchful society, was as good as a proposal. They met in secret, and Laura’s connivance was needed to arrange the meetings. She was as drunk with the romance of it all as Piera and Alexander; she waited on guard on the lawn beneath the stars, tense and ecstatic, while they whispered in the shadow of the boat house. She was perhaps happier than they.
They had kissed once: the first evening. Given abruptly and received awkwardly, the kiss had landed near Piera’s ear. After it neither had dared move. They had held still so long their necks began to ache. Piera had tried with all her heart to feel delighted, but not even when she was alone could she manage it; and she did not mention the kiss to Laura. Alexander did not offer to repeat it. At most he held her hand: and when he did, his was wet. She did not much like that soft, nervous touch, and as they talked would contrive to withdraw her own hand, and he would not notice.
Once, in one of the endless conversations that were their chief pleasure, Laura had said, “You know, Peri, I can tell you something now.”
“What, what, what?”
“Nothing really. I used to wonder what it would be like if you and Itale fell in love. You know how you think things like that, just arranging the world to suit yourself. . . .”
Piera nodded.
“It wouldn’t have done at all, really.”
“Why not?”
“Oh—his politics. And both your tempers. And anyhow, he isn’t Alexander!”
As she sat by the fire, her composition on the Duties of the Young Female on her knee, Piera thought again of that brief conversation, of Laura’s wistful, teasing, loving look, and the same chill of fear ran through her. Fall in love with Itale, marry him? No! That was something altogether different from Alexander Sorentay and being engaged and holding hands. That was no game she could play, nothing she could manage, it was not to be thought of; nor was he to be thought of, the scent of mandevilia, and the roar of summer rain, and the door open and he standing there. She had not read the book he had given her, the New Life. It stood in her bookshelf in her room, and she never took it out. And she had believed, this morning, that he was coming back! That was nonsense. He was not coming back. He was gone.
Auntie’s eyes had closed, her fingers lay motionless on the red yarn. “Young girls should be obeidient. . . . They should be neat and orderly. . . .” Piera yawned, and neighbor Rodenne said grinning from the card table, “Don’t swallow the fireplace, contesina!”
Voices and steps outside. Piera bounced up; visitors, thank God! It was Father Klement wanting a word with Count Orlant about the next meeting of the Catholic Men’s Sodality of Val Malafrena, and the Sordes come along with him for the walk. Eleonora had brought some new silks for Auntie. “Is your rheumatism any better, Auntie dear?” she asked, and the old lady, raising her clear grey eyes from sleep without the least surprise, said, “No.” Guide and neighbor Rodenne fell to talking hounds. Piera went off to the kitchen to stir up the cook, for Count Orlant never let a guest leave unfed. The new overseer rose from the interrupted vist game to stretch his legs and warm his back at the fire. Laura, who had seen him only a few times before, asked politely, “Are you liking it here at Malafrena, Mr Gavrey?”
“Aye, miss,” he answered. She blushed as she always did when talking to a stranger. That was all their conversation.
As the Sordes went home by the lake-shore path Laura asked, “What sort of man is Count Orlant’s new overseer, father?”
“A considerable improvement. He may get the estate run something like properly, if he keeps at it.”
“I can’t find out much about him,” said Eleonora. “Of course he’s not one of the Gavres from Kulme, it’s Gavrey; his father’s a farmer, freeholder, near Mor Altesma, he’s the second son. He’s very closemouthed, none of the
women at Valtorsa know a thing about him. I hope he’s honest. How can you trust a closemouthed man?”
“You can trust him not to blabber,” Guide said with dry good humor. He was still in the good mood of the early morning. He breathed the night air of autumn as they walked, felt his body as straight and lithe as ever, and held his wife’s arm in his own. Fifty-six wasn’t the worst time of life. It was pleasant to walk home in the darkness of October, under pines and stars, between two well-beloved women.
When Laura bade him good night before going upstairs he kissed her and sketched the cross on her hair, as he did rarely since she was grown.
Eleonora watched, and thought, “You have your daughter, but I do not have my son.” But the flicker of bitterness was lost as she looked at Laura’s face: all evening long, as always when she was tense or troubled, Laura’s likeness to her brother had been very strong, Itale had been in the turn of her head, in the tone of her voice. On whose head had Guide set his blessing? His eyes, his hands, were kinder than his head, and wiser.
She followed Laura upstairs after a little. As she passed the empty bedroom something moved, a figure between the doorway and the grey starlit window.
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