by Grant Allen
It was in Rue’s drawing-room, accordingly, a few weeks later, that Linnet for the first time saw Will Deverill once more after all that had happened. With the same generous self-restraint he had always shown wherever Linnet’s reputation was concerned, Will had denied himself for many days the pleasure of calling upon her. When at last he came, Linnet made up her mind beforehand she should receive him with becoming calmness and dignity. But the moment Will entered the room, and took her two hands in his, and looked deep into her dark eyes, and stood there silent, thrilling through from head to foot at sight of her, yet rejoicing in heart at his one love recovered — why, as for Linnet, she just looked up at him, and drew short gasps of breath, and held his hands tight in her own, and then with a sweet half-unconscious self-surrender let herself fall slowly, slowly upon his bosom. There he allowed her to lie long without speaking one word to her. What need of words between those two who understood one another instinctively? what chance of concealing the hope and joy each felt, and knew, and communicated, unspoken, by mere contact to the other? For touch is to love the most eloquent of the senses.
At last they found words, and talked long and eagerly. There was no question between them now in what relation they must henceforth stand to one another. It was mere details of time, and place, and propriety — the when and how and where — that interested them at present. “But you can get a dispensation for me?” Linnet asked, nestling close to him.
Will smiled a gentle smile. “There’s little need of dispensation, for you and me, my darling,” he said, holding her hand tenderly. “You would have given me yourself once, in spite of the Church and the world: you can surely give me yourself now without a qualm of conscience, when the Church and the world will both smile approval. To me, Linnet, the whole sanctity of a union between us lies infinitely deeper than any man’s sanction, be he priest or Pope or king or lawgiver. As I said to you, once before, you are mine, and I am yours, not by any artificial bond, but by the voice of our hearts, which is the voice of nature and of God within us: and whom God hath joined together, man cannot join firmer, nor yet put asunder. But if it pleases you to ask some priest’s leave for the union no priest on earth can possibly make sacreder — yes; set your heart at rest about that, darling; — I’ve seen the Archbishop already, and he’s promised to get you the regular papal dispensation.”
Linnet leant back, and gazed up at him. Her gaze was half fear, half frank admiration. “Dearest Will,” she said, pleadingly, in her pretty foreign English, “you’re a man, I’m a woman, and therefore illogical: forgive me. I’ve been brought up to think one way, which I know is a dreadful way: my own heart tells me how foolish and cruel and wicked it is to think so; and yet — may the Blessed Madonna and all holy saints forgive me for saying it — I should be afraid of their anger and the eternal hell if I dared to disbelieve in what seems so cruel. You speak to me of another way, which my own heart tells me is just and pure and good and beautiful — which my head approves as common-sense and sound reasoning; and yet — may the Blessed Madonna forgive me again — though I try hard to believe it, the teachings of my childhood rise up at every step and prevent my accepting it. I can’t understand this mystery of open war between God and our hearts — between God, who made them, on the one hand, and what is best, not what is worst, within them, on the other. I pray for light, but no light comes. Why should God’s law fight so hard against God’s instincts in our souls — against all that we feel to be purest, noblest, truest, best in our nature?”
“Not God’s law,” Will said gently, smoothing her hand with his own, “but the priests’, Linnet, the priests’, — which is something quite different. God’s law is never some precept beyond and outside us: it is the law of our own being, the law of our own hearts, the law of the native instincts and impulses that stir us. Your marriage with Andreas, were it twenty times blessed by priest or by Pope, was from the very first moment an unholy and unnatural one. It was a sin against purity and your own body; it was a legalised lie, a lifelong adultery. You felt its shame yourself, and shrank from the man physically. Your heart was not his, so how could your body be? Even the laws of men would have allowed you to leave him and come home to me, whose complement and mate you are by nature, after his treatment of you that day, and your discovery of his letter to Philippina. But the laws of your Church, which are not the laws of men but the laws of priests — and therefore worse and more unnatural than even the common laws of mankind — forbade you to take advantage of the loophole of escape which divorce would permit you from that wicked union your priests had imposed upon you. The Church or the law that bids you live with a man you loathe and despise, that Church or law dishonours your own nature; that Church and that law is not of God, nor even of man, but of priests and the devil. The Church or the law that forbids you to live with the man your own heart dictates and points out to you, is equally of the devil. And see how it proves itself so! It needed the intervention of Franz Lindner’s knife to free you from your false union with Andreas Hausberger! Can that Church and that law be right or sound which make a murder the one loophole by which a soul can free itself from the unholy bond they would unwillingly impose upon it? Your own heart told you it was wrong and dishonouring to live with Andreas; your own heart shrank from his loveless embraces; your own heart showed you it was right to leave him, and fly away to the man you loved, the man that loved you. Will you believe that God’s law is worse than your own heart? Will you think there’s something divine in an institution of men which compels you to degrade and dishonour your own body, to sin so cruelly against your own pure instincts? Nothing can be wickeder, I say, than for a woman to sell herself or to yield herself in any way to a man she loathes. No Church and no law can make right of that wrong: it’s degrading and debasing to her moral nature. The moment a woman feels she gives herself up against her own free will and the instincts of her own heart, she is living in sin — and you know it, Linnet — though all the priests and all the Popes on earth should stretch robed arms and hands to bless and absolve her.”
He spoke with fierce conviction. Linnet nestled against his breast: his words overcame her. “I know it, Will, I know it,” she exclaimed, half-hysterically. “My heart told me so always — but I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe it now, — though I know you’re right when I hear you speak so. Perhaps, some day, when I’ve lived with you long enough, I shall come to think and feel as you do. . . . But for the present, my darling, I’m so glad, oh, so glad, — don’t laugh at me for saying it — that you’ve got a dispensation.”
Rosalba
THE STORY OF HER DEVELOPMENT: WITH OTHER EPISODES OF THE EUROPEAN MOVEMENT, MORE ESPECIALLY AS THEY AFFECTED THE MONTI BERICI NEAR VICENZA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
The first edition’s title page
CHAPTER I
OF MEETINGS
I SAW him first on the Monti Berici, near Vicenza.
“By him you would say, of course, the man you were to marry.”
Now, you dear, sophisticated English reader, marriage-ridden as you are, with your crystallised and stereotyped Teutonic ideas, do you indeed imagine I woul
d thus forestall my whole tale at the outset? If you do, you are far from the Kingdom of the South; you fail to comprehend the Mediterranean temperament.
In Italy marriage is an institution; love is a romance. We do not say him of the man our parents design us to marry.
These words alarm you? Then read no further. I write for those who can gaze with sympathy on the warm tempestuous southern seas, not for those whose hearts are ice-bound in the sluggish straits of the north. Romance for us Italians does not find its culmination in what your English lawyers poetically describe as an ante-nuptial settlement.
I saw him first, then, I repeat, where asphodels bloom, on the Monti Berici, near Vicenza.
What manner of mischievous Italian imp I must have been at that time I can scarce remember; ‘t is hard to think oneself back into one’s own dim childhood. But he has told me, and I believe him. About ten years old; dark-haired, dark-eyed, with deep brown tints like one of Giorgione’s peasants; a wild little wayward creature; lithe figure, face full of reserve and questioning wistfulness; dressed in a somewhat exaggerated Italian costume, and chattering volubly in the liquid dialect of the Venetian mainland. “But with a twinkle — such a twinkle!” he says; and you may no doubt accept his evidence. I was pert, I feel sure, and a complete stranger to reverence. To this day, indeed, I am accused of flippancy by the elephantine, stolid-eyed British matron.
We were people of some importance in our day, we Lupari — on the Monti Berici. (Pronounce our name to rhyme with soupery and coopery, if you please, not with starry and chikari.) In the first place, we were landed proprietors. Not perhaps in the same sense as the Duke of Devonshire or the Princes of Recoaro are landed proprietors; for my father’s holding, I am credibly informed, though it seemed to us a perfect principality, amounted to no more than some three and a half acres. But a landowner is a landowner, no matter how little land he may own; nay, the smaller his property, the greater the sense of dignity it confers. My father was a man who had a high idea of himself and his possessions. He respected the Lupari. Christian name Antonio — which as good as showed he was an eldest son; for we lived near enough to Padua to look upon St Antony as the chiefest of saints; so the first boy begotten in each family for miles around was always christened Antonio — except of course in the case of freemasons and freethinkers, who named their first-born Giuseppe, after “the glorious Garibaldi,” or else Vittorio Emanuele, after the Liberator King. ‘T was the sign of a good Catholic to make your eldest an Antonio. That last applies to these latter days alone, I need hardly say; for when my father was christened we still groaned in Venetia under Austrian despotism; and, being all good Catholics, everybody then was alike an Antonio.
The Monti Berici rise abruptly from the boundless plain like rocky islands from the sea. They rise close above Vicenza; so close that from their steep flanks — vine-trellised, cypress-fringed — you look right down into the grey streets of the city, with all its stately, crowded palaces. The principal hill of the group we call by way of distinction the Monte Berico; on its bald summit stands, smouldering white in the Italian sun, the great church of the Madonna, where we children went to hear mass every Sunday morning. No church in the world was so “grand,” we knew, as the Madonna del Monte. It had such a vast dome that when you threw back your head and gazed up into it you seemed to see the heavens opened. An arcaded path leads zigzag from the town to the portico of the sanctuary, that pilgrims as they mount may be sheltered from the heat of the day in summer. Our house and vineyard stood quite close to these arcades, and we children used to play there on the dusty open space beside the crucifix, which is known as Al Cristo.
Mariana and I were playing there on the morning when I first saw him.
It was early spring. Snatches of perfume reached us. The bare branches of the vines, trained in long loops from tree to tree, after hanging through the winter like rusty brown ropes, were just transmuting themselves into living festoons of wan green foliage. Dainty pink tendrils with purple tips were beginning to put forth their twining fingers, and to feel about on every side for some support to clutch at. The big wistaria on our cottage wall had tumbled in wild cataracts of lilac bloom. Our neighbours’ laburnums were hanging out their pendulous swaying clusters. Pyramids of white blossom transformed the horse-chestnuts into huge candelabra. It was the southern May — that golden month whose echo your northern poets have borrowed from our own, but whose soft sweet air you can never have felt till you feel it in Italy.
Mariana and I were engaged on a little difference of private judgment under the arcade by the crucifix. Mariana wanted to play at the fight with the Austrians, while I wanted to play at burying the patriots after the battle. My patch of black cloth made such a lovely catafalque! We had grown hot with discussing this moot point in our choicest dialect, not unaided by our hands — so hot, that we hardly noticed at first the unwonted arrival of two English strangers. The epithet, indeed, may be considered superfluous, for we spoke of all forestieri at Vicenza as Inglesi.
They were of the tourist species; we knew it at once by the discriminative marks of a small red book, and a pair of opera-glasses hung in a leather case over their left shoulders. Both were young and good-looking specimens. Mariana and I fell apart to stare at them, one on each side of the covered way, so that the tourists had to walk the gauntlet up the midst between us. We stood and stared open-mouthed, with the frank and undisguised curiosity of our age and station. Mariana sucked her thumb to aid her in staring. We had not yet learned the artificial conventionalities of maidenly modesty.
I am bound to admit, however, that if we stared at the tourists, the tourists returned the stare with interest More than that, they criticised us with charming unreserve in their own language. “Not bad little ragamuffins!” the elder of the two remarked, with an air of vast British superiority to the mere unkempt Italian peasant. “Picturesque enough in their way. Good pieces of colour in their head-kerchiefs and petticoats.”
How do I know what they said? Well, that is my business. But since it is I who am telling this story and you who are listening to it, we may as well set ourselves straight on that subject now, at the very outset. Let it be granted that’t is impossible for anybody really to recollect the full details of his or her own childhood. Our mental picture is made up of endless confused touches, each blurred in the outline, from the mass of which nevertheless there stands out for ourselves a clear and vivid general Impression. It is that general Impression that we wish to reproduce for others when we describe our early days; and we can only reproduce it by filling in the details a great deal more precisely than each exists in our own memories. So, in reporting these ensuing conversations, I mean to tell you, not so much what I remember to have been actually said, as what I believe or imagine was the gist of each episode. And now that we have set that matter straight once for all, I shall go on with my narrative. Do not blame my Method till you have seen my results. Bear with a beginner who is feeling her way in fear and trembling along the thorny and critic-set path of literature.
“Yes, the younger one is pretty enough,” the other man answered, without regarding Mariana’s feelings: Mariana was two years my senior. “Her nose is a bit snubby, but otherwise she’ll do. She’s piquante at any rate. And her big black eyes are so full of wonder. I call her a characteristic Italian figure. That scarlet bow throws up her dusky skin. The elder is commonplace. Nothing distinctive about her. Might be Seven Dials. But I have half a mind to try my hand at the little one.”
I was surprised at this, for Mariana was always much admired for her pomegranate mouth and her long black eyelashes, while I was considered a very secondary beauty.
He pulled out a pencil as he spoke, and began jotting down something in a sketch-book which he carried. I stood with one foot held up in my hand behind me. As he looked up at me and then down at the paper from time to time, I recognised at once that he was “taking my likeness,” and assumed a self-conscious air in consequence. As for Mariana, thus slighted
, she glanced over his shoulder as the candid friend, sucking her thumb critically, and withdrawing it now and then to make uncomplimentary remarks about both sitter and artist in our native Italian. “It’s not one bit like your nose, Rosalba! Neppurur sogno! He can’t draw as well as our boys can draw with a bit of chalk on the wall. I call him a poor creature — non vale un soldo. But he’s making it, oh, ever so much too pretty for you, dear! If I were drawing you, I wouldn’t put your nose the least like that. And the dress! oh, poverina, it’s not your dress at all! It’s quite ridiculous!”
“The children appear to be judges of art on the Monti Berici, Wingham,” the elder man broke in at last, with a curious smile, catching a part of our patois, for he knew some words of Italian. But, to our great delight, he pronounced the name of our mountains with the accent on the wrong syllable. Now, nothing amuses Italians more than the hash that foreigners make of their accents. I burst out laughing in his face. “He says Berici, Mariana, instead of Beri’ci? I cried in derision.
The elder man, in grey, whose name, we had observed, was Stodmarsh, coloured up strongly as I spoke. I did not discover till much later in life that he fancied himself an Italian scholar, and gave himself airs with his friend the artist on the strength of his supposed mastery of the choicest Tuscan. “Ha! it’s pronounced Berry-chy, then, not Ber-eechy,” he said in a short, snappy voice, collusively crushing. “That’s the worst of these local Italian names; one never can know beforehand what the people of the place are going to call them. The error, of course, is natural. It has no more to do with the knowledge of the language, as such, than the pronunciation of some of our English local names has to do with a man’s fitness to lecture on Shakespeare. Meopham in Kent, for example, is pronounced Meppam, and Bovey in Devonshire is simply Buvvy.”
