by Grant Allen
“My duty to my other pupils!” Miss Westmacott interposed, setting her mouth very hard and jerking out short exclamatory sentences. She sat like a statue, massively indignant “No animus against your ward, of course, Mr. Stodmarsh — most remarkable behaviour! But when I first took her in I felt that the extremely doubtful antecedents—”
“There is no necessity to go into that now,” John answered manfully. “Rosalba has suffered; you must see for yourself that her nerves are shattered, temporarily. — We feel, Rosalba, you would not desire to meet the other girls after this expo — this unfortunate occurrence. The woman who upset you will not return to England; I have guarded against that; and I will keep myself informed through her priest as to her whereabouts. But you we must place elsewhere. On that, Miss Westmacott is quite as convinced as I am.”
“Oh, impossible to keep her,” Miss Westmacott intervened, imperturbable still, but resolute. “Incalculable harm done already to the other girls. My only plan to say that this unutterable Irishwoman had been Rosalba’s foster-mother; and that Rosalba was so agitated at meeting her after years of separation in such a degraded condition — a few weeks at the seaside — rest and change of air — a complete nervous shock; I see no other way out of it.”
“Perhaps, Miss Westmacott,” John interposed, noting my fiery cheeks, “if you were to leave my ward and myself alone, we might arrange this affair between ourselves more easily.”
Miss Westmacott was on edge. She rose and sailed loftily out of the room, as I could imagine her mother sailing, with a turban on her head and three ostrich-feathers in her hair, from George the Third’s presence. “If I am not wanted,” she remarked at the door, her nether lip protruding like the prototypal camel’s, “I am sure I am glad to be relieved of this most unpleasant duty. I distrusted the girl from the first; but unhappily I permitted myself, against my better judgment, to be talked over by Mrs. Mallory. I can only pray now that the moral poison your protégée has imported into my school may not have infected—” The rest of the sentence died away inaudibly but imperturbably down the recesses of the passage.
John carried me off to Auntie’s that very night. I think his annoyance at Miss Westmacott’s point of view made him more gentle and sympathetic than he would otherwise have been. He was so nice and forbearing, indeed, that when he had talked to me for a while about my future and my new school — for he meant to send me elsewhere — I rose up for the first time in my life and spontaneously kissed him.
That encouraged him to say, “I suppose you have guessed, Rosalba, for what object I am educating you?”
I quivered and looked down. “I think so, John,” I answered in a low voice at last I fear my downcast eyes and my whispered words misled him a little; for he took my hand in his and murmured very softly, “This will make no difference to me, dear; I still mean it.”
“Thank you, John,” I answered. I recognised that, from his own standpoint, this was magnanimous. “You are very good and kind. I am — deeply grateful to you.”
“Then you will marry me, Rosalba?” he went on, leaning forward almost affectionately. “My poor child, I am so sorry for you!”
His kindness went to my heart like a dagger. I felt myself a hypocrite. “Yes — I will marry you,” I faltered out A bargain is a bargain. And he had really touched me that evening by his genuine generosity.
He went on to talk of his plans for my happiness. “It never occurred to me,” he said in a gentle voice, “that you wished to learn about your father. I thought the past was a dead past behind you. But if you still desire to know, Rosalba, why not write to the Monti Berici?” He laid the accent on the right syllable this time. He had forgotten me, but remembered his lesson.
Strange as you may think it, that simple idea had not once yet dawned upon me. When I left Italy, I seemed to leave all things Italian behind me; and though I had longed and wondered, I never dreamt of writing to ask. I told John so, simply.
“I will write for you, dear,” he answered, with one hand on my arm—” write in my own name to make inquiries merely — write as a friend who is interested in you.”
“Oh, how good of you, John!” I cried. For myself, I feared and dreaded it so much, I could never have written.
“But you must not expect a very pleasant account,” he continued, playing with a paper-knife. “After your mother, you know, we can hardly look forward to finding your family — well, flourishing and creditable. I fear your father—”
“My father,” I said, the pride of the Lupari asserting itself even then, “is an Italian par triot.”
“In my experience,” John answered, setting his lips, “a patriot means a man who hopes to make money out of his country.”
In spite of everything, I believed in the Lupari legend still. “You mistake, John,” I answered. “He has made sacrifices for Italy. I love and respect and admire my father.” John was kind enough and wise enough to make no answer.
A few days later, while I was still at Auntie’s looking about me for a new school, and recovering from my shock, which had shaken me to the core, John came back with a letter. He did not show it to me; he read from it. “Your father does not write himself,” he began. “This is from your sister Mariana.”
I jumped at the worst “He is dead!” I cried. “Oh, tell me!”
John saw it was useless to try breaking the news. “Yes, he is dead,” he answered, making a movement forward.
I gave a shriek of despair. You may fail to understand it, but all those years I had loved and longed for my father. I had always looked forward to returning some day to the Monti Berici to see him. He had filled my daydreams. And now, the swelling consciousness of the wrong I had done him broke over me like a wave. It stunned me with its impact. Remorse gnawed at my heart. I uttered one wail of horror, and then fell fainting.
CHAPTER XVIII
AN UNREHEARSED EPISODE
SOME days passed before I had strength of mind enough to read Mariana’s letter. When I steeled myself to turn to it, I learnt that my dear father had been dead some months, and that he died a good Catholic—” fortified with all the consolations of the Church,” my sister said piously. Mother had left him, Mariana went on without further note, a couple of years earlier—” and a good thing, too, per fortuna, for she was getting too much for us.” That was all about mother. Most of the letter, however, rang with the name and the fame of Uncle Giuseppe, who about the same time had come back from America. I vaguely remembered this Uncle Giuseppe; he left us under a cloud when I was a baby. He emigrated to the Argentine, I fancy, which is what the Italian peasant always means when he speaks of “America.” And now he had come back, Mariana wrote, in rather vague terms — studiously vague, I thought — and was “taking care of her.” I laid down the letter with a sinking sense of being alone in the world. Till then, home meant to me the Monti Berici still; I had always looked forward in some dim future to returning there and meeting my father. Now, there was no one left in the place whom I cared to see; for, in a way, I felt I had outgrown Mariana.
Yet something in Mariana’s epistle puzzled me. To begin with, she wrote from Milan. Her letter gave no date or place, it is true, but the postmark read “Milano”; and when I examined the envelope, I found its flap bore the name and address of a stationer in the Via Alessandro Manyoni. Now, what could Mariana be doing in Milan? I wondered. Then, again, there was an air of conscious restraint about the wording of her sentences. She told me nothing of herself, nothing of her surroundings. Her reticence seemed calculated. I gathered that Mariana did not wish me to know her exact whereabouts, or desire that I should communicate further with her. She wanted to cast me off. Perhaps that was natural.
I set out for my new school a few weeks later. It was a school in the country (Heaven be praised!), kept by a much younger and more modern woman — a school of the latest type, with a brand-new head-mistress direct from Girton. Her coiffure suggested the higher mathematics. It was neatly braided in many plaits and coils
. She was not mediaeval. I was happier there than at Miss Westmacott’s; but I will not trouble you much with that second school: it is immaterial to my story. My life lay outside it, in the times I spent at Auntie’s or elsewhere.
During my next vacation, when I was nearly nineteen, Arthur Wingham came down to stop at Auntie’s. He used often to paint me still, and he made me pose for him in some of my Shakespearean scenes, which I still loved to impersonate, though without the dollies. I have said that he made me call him Dudu — it had been his mother’s name for him, he told me; and I was so fond of him in a girlish way that I liked to call him so. The Great Awakening had come upon me, but not consciously as yet; I thought we were still just boy and girl at play together.
We rode often over the open downs side by side on our bicycles. A dark, heather-clad ridge bounded the view from Auntie’s cottage to westward; solitary clumps of Scotch fir stood out at intervals like lonely obelisks against the pale sky-line. There we delighted to ride. After the niggling scenery of the lowlands, these broad horizons hold one. For miles and miles we saw neither house nor man; we moved alone with nature. Speckled adders lay coiled on the road at times; the cry of the jay startled us from the pine-woods.
Beloved Pan, how I have loved you! How I have seen you half hide, goat-footed, in cool brake and moist thicket! What oreads and naiads, what fauns and sileni of my southern home have mingled for me with the pixies on the English moors! Am I not still part Pagan? Have I not had sight of Proteus rising from the sea, and heard old Triton blow his wreathed horn?
One afternoon Auntie went out, and I was left alone in the studio with Dudu.
“You must sit for me as Miranda, Dru,” he said, with an almost imperious air, when I strolled in after lunch, for he ordered me about like a brother. “I want to finish that study.”
“Very well, Dudu,” I answered submissively — I am an obedient creature when I am not in open revolt; so I went upstairs to array myself in the flowing white robe, almost Greek in its simplicity, which I had devised for the character.
When I came down, Dudu arranged my draperies as he wanted them for the study, and posed my bare arms on the parapet of pasteboard rock in Prospero’s cave. I was conscious of a faint lingering of his fingers on my arms as he posed them.
Then he took up his palette and stood irresolute in front of the easel. I waited for him to begin. He looked up at me, then down at the unfinished study, then up at me once more, then let his hand drop listless.
“Why don’t you begin?” I asked, quivering.
His eyes gazed through me. “I can’t,” he answered. “O Dru, Dru, Dru, I don’t want to paint you!”
“I thought you liked painting me,” I murmured. My own heart beat faster.
He made a quick little gesture of the hand. “I love it, and you know I love it!” he answered.
“Then why not begin?” I asked again. My breath came and went hurriedly.
“Because — because I want to talk to you,” he replied, coming nearer, “not to paint you.” I broke the pose, and drew back to a chair. “Then — talk,” I said faintly, letting myself drop into it “I mustn’t,” he answered. “Ah, Dru, you understand! You know how I feel. For Stodmarsh’s sake it would be wrong. It would be — treason to Stodmarsh.”
I knew he was quite right “It would,” I answered, rolling the words on my tongue—” treason — to Stodmarsh.”
“And yet, Dru—”
“Yes, yes; I know, Arthur.”
He turned to me with a grateful look. “We two don’t need to speak. We understand one another — darling.”
I nodded my head. “Too well; dear Arthur.”
“Dru, he is my friend.”
“Dudu, he is my guardian — and I have promised to marry him.”
“But — you love me?”
“I never quite knew it — till to-day,” I answered, with a catch in my throat.
“But — you suspected it?”
“Oh yes, I suspected it; but — I never admitted it. I tried to shut my eyes. I tried to pretend — to pretend it was only friendship.” He made the same quick gesture again. “And so did I. Fools both! The old, old blind! That silly pretence, friendship!”
“Still, Dudu, we mustn’t say so even to each other.”
“No, no. I know that. I am a brute to have said even as much as I have said to you.” We both paused and drank one another in with our eyes. For a long time neither spoke. Something thrilled through the air. Electric tremors came and went. Then I broke the silence.
“Dudu, I must not speak to you of this again.”
“Nor I to you, dear one. For John’s sake, I am ashamed of myself.”
“It was my fault I led you on.”
“No, mine. I am a man; a man is for that; I ought to have been strong enough.”
“We must never do it again.”
“Never. — But still — O Dru! — you said you loved me!”
“N-not quite.”
“Well, at least, you admitted it.”
I blushed crimson. “I couldn’t help it,” I answered. “Dudu, it was ever so wicked; yet I’m glad we know, because now — we understand each other.”
“We do.”
“But we must never speak of it again. I feel we have done wrong. John has cause to be annoyed with us.”
There was another long, delicious pause. This time, Arthur spoke. “And you mean to marry him?”
“I must. There is no other way. I cannot get out of it now. I owe him so much; and — a bargain is a bargain.”
“You are right. Ah, Dru, I am so ashamed of myself for this! John has trusted us both. We have betrayed his trust. We have behaved very ill to him.”
“Very ill. I am ashamed of it.”
“And of me?”
“No, never of you, Dudu. You love me. How could you help it, then? Everything is forgiven to one who loves much — quia multum amavit.”
“So we must say good-bye to all this?”
I bent my head. “For ever.”
“If so, I may, just this once — for goodbye!”
He leant over me. My lips trembled. One hand held my heart, to keep it from bursting. “Yes, once — only this once — for good-bye, Dudu!”
He stooped down and pressed my lips hard. At that moment, oh how I loved him!
Then we both moved apart — quickly, reluctantly — and sat far away from each other on the seats of the studio.
After that, assuming a tone of cold morality, I told him very firmly (from a safe distance) how this must never happen again; and how wrong and deceitful it all was towards John; and how much I really respected that excellent man, in spite of his little priggishnesses. He had always been good to me, and I had been a hypocrite. I was a little beast not to love him when he had done so much for me. I could not quite love him — my heart being otherwise occupied — but I was grateful, really grateful — I hoped. At any rate, not for worlds would I do anything to break my compact. “I love you, Dudu; but John I will marry.”
“And when you are married, Dru, what shall I ever do? You will allow me to see you?”
I reflected and was wise. “When I am married, Dudu,” I said, shaking my head, “I shall not let you come near me. You must invent some reason for dropping my acquaintance. The great gulf of marriage must be fixed between us. It is the only safe way” (see how prudent I was!), “and the only course that is just to John. After what has occurred today, I will not see you at all — when once I am married.”
I said it, firmly meaning it Yet, alas! how weak is human nature! After I was married, I saw Dudu every day; and every day I saw him I loved’ him better. Do not prejudge me because I make this avowal. Wait till you have heard all, and then decide whether or not I was justified.
CHAPTER XIX
“THE LUPARI”
WHEN I was a little over nineteen, I left school; in the funny phrase which girls use, “my education was finished.” It might be fairer to say it was just beginning.
John did not propose to marry me at once. In that, as in everything, he was justice itself to me. “I should be taking an unfair advantage of you, Rosalba,” he said, “if I were to urge you to marry me before you are twenty-one. Indeed, since I am your guardian by courtesy only (though I have your mother’s authority in writing), I could not do so without your parents’ consent — and that, you may readily conceive, I do not choose to ask for.”
“As you wish, John,” I answered, letting my eyes rest on the vast sweep of the sandstone ridge with its solitary pines. I love these great panoramas better than all the paradises of the landscape-painters — bits, they call them. The broad horizons teach one resignation. For myself, I was resigned. I did not love John; I could not love him: but I respected and liked him; and since I was bound to him by every tie of promise and maintenance, what did it matter to me whether he married me this year or next or the year after? I loved dear Dudu; I realised that now; but I could never marry him. John had claims upon me; those claims I must satisfy. I could not eat his bread for so many years and then turn round and refuse to fulfil my part of the bargain.
The intervening time before my marriage I spent with Auntie — John paying by arrangement for my board and lodging. He thought it the best plan. But we often went up by invitation to his house in Avenue Road, St John’s Wood, where I was introduced to his friends — wives and daughters of Cabinet Ministers — as Miss Lupari, whom he intended to marry: “She lives at present with her adopted aunt, my cousin, Mrs. Mallory. — Linda, dear, will you bring Rosalba over to be presented to Lady Macpherson?” For John made a point of doing everything decently and in order. If he married a waif and stray, he would marry her by the card, lest equivocation should undo her.
