by Grant Allen
One day, during one such visit, I was shopping with Auntie in Bond Street — buying airy little daintinesses such as John loved to see me in — when a victoria drew up at the door of the shop we were just quitting. A lady descended from it I must do her the justice to say she was a properly “grand” lady; Mariana would have rejoiced in her. But she was also strikingly pretty. Dark, mignonne, with large melting eyes and a delicately moulded nose, she had an infantine downiness and roundness of face which suggested a ripe nectarine. Her own wee gloves were not softer or daintier. She was exquisitely dressed, with rather more regard to fashion and less to picturesqueness than I myself prefer; but granted the genre, her taste was unimpeachable. The fluffiness and filminess of her fly-away chiffons just suited that waxen dark peach-coloured cheek. I stopped to gaze at her. So did Auntie, frankly.
It seemed an innocent babyish face withal; but I saw, on second thoughts, it was the innocence of a Greuze, not the innocence of an Angelico, or even of a Reynolds.
As I gazed, I was aware that the lady’s eyes lighted upon me with an inquiring glance, and then retreated under shelter of the softly fringed eyelids. The length and darkness of those lashes struck me as strangely familiar. So did the pomegranate mouth, the dimpled chin. But the lady brushed past us as though she resented our looking at her. She brushed past us with such an air of suppressed eagerness, such a furtive side-glance under the covering shadow of the long velvet lashes, such a worldly-wise dimpling of the small cheeks by the corner of the rich mouth, that I felt sure she was anxious to avoid our observation. I allowed her to pass in; then I whispered to Auntie, “I am going back again — to look at her.”
She was seated by the counter as I entered, with her back towards the door, and she said to the girl who waited upon her, in a very musical voice with just the faintest tinge of Italian accent, “I want to see some silk chemises, if you please — prettily trimmed — the newest style — with coloured ribbons.”
I knew that silvery-liquid voice among ten thousand. “Mariana!” I cried, faltering.
She turned and eyed me through a tortoiseshell eye-glass — one of those atrocious long-handled aristocratic outrages with which very grand ladies choose to gorgonise their social inferiors. “I beg your pardon,” she said slowly, “but — you have the advantage of me.”
“Auntie!” I exclaimed, turning to Mrs.
Mallory, “this is my sister Mariana, about whom I have spoken to you.”
Mariana transferred her stony stare to Auntie. I am bound to admit she did it thoroughly. The set of her small mouth spoke volumes of reticence. “Ah, your aunt!” she murmured, raising her arched eyebrows.
“She is an acquired aunt,” I went on.
“Indeed!” Her tone was icy.
“Mariana,” I said again, “don’t you know me? I am Rosalba.”
She did not commit herself. “Rosalba?” she repeated with a far-away air, as if the name sounded dimly familiar, like church-bells under water. “You call yourself Rosalba.”
I knew what she was doing. She was waiting to gain time; watching for straws which might show what way the wind blew; and reflecting whether or not it would be wise to recognise me. Was I the sort of person to do her good or harm? Would I assist or hurt her social advancement?
“I had certainly a sister of that name once,” she answered at last, in her sweet voice, after she had closely noted Auntie’s dress, her brooch, her gloves, her bonnet The small mouth parted its lips a little. I could see her making a mental note to herself—” Externally presentable; case for further inquiry.”
For ten minutes she fenced, turning over the silk chemises meanwhile and making running comments upon them intended to impress us with a proper idea of her grandeur. “I can do better in Paris.” Then she drew Auntie aside and asked a few direct questions. I could not overhear them, but from a stray word or two which reached me I caught at the drift of Auntie’s answers. “Adopted niece.... Name well known as a painter — Gentleman of position — head of a department in the Local Government Board.... Not till year after next... — . Most liberal allowance.. — . — . Oh yes, excellent schools.... In every way a lady.”
After that, Mariana tripped prettily back to me, and extended her hand with a forgiving gesture. “So long since I have seen you, dear!” she said with a tender trill in that musical voice of hers. “You fell upon me like a tile, and you can easily understand that, under all the circumstances, I did not recognise you. — Accordion-pleated, if you please. How much? — And even when I began to realise that it was you — well, I wished to understand your relation to — to that other member of our family who, when I last heard of her, was also in London. You will see at once that for a person in My position it would be highly undesirable to be brought into contact with a person in hers. I have my position to maintain.” And Mariana simpered.
“You are married, I suppose?” I said, just a little awestruck at the superior way in which she held out her dimpled cheek demurely for me to kiss. I kissed it with what I must call official affection.
“Oh no! not married. — I will have three of these, if you please, and three of the batiste with the Valenciennes edges. — Not married, of course; but surely you have heard of me; you know of my success; you read the papers?”
I confessed to having failed to notice her name in the journals of my native country. What could an English schoolgirl know of Parisian operatic triumphs?
Mariana simpered again. “Uncle Giuseppe has brought me here,” she said, turning over some lace handkerchiefs with a deliberative smile, and speaking sideways at me. “Caro zio! I have an engagement at the new opera-house. I have been singing in Paris. You must surely have heard that Zio Giuseppe had me trained for the operatic stage? Under Ronzi of Milan, you know — the last survivor in Italy of the old Italian school of singing. Zio Giuseppe came back rich from America — did I mention it when I wrote to you? — and he has adopted me, my dear, adopted me. Odd coincidence that, under such different circumstances, we should both of us have been adopted!” And Mariana sucked — no longer her thumb, but the tortoise-shell ball in the eagle’s claw on the handle of her umbrella.
By this time she had decided mentally that I was quite presentable, and she invited us, therefore, to drive with her in her victoria. I accepted the offer; Auntie declined: I think she left us alone on purpose. We took a turn round the park, Mariana dwelling as she went on her own present grandeur, the gifts she had received from her admirers in Paris, the applause she had gained in the part of Carmen, and the splendid prospects which opened out before her. She did not tell her story: it transpired. Facts trickled out piecemeal. But she also managed, parenthetically, to extract a large amount of information from me as to my own position and future. She was an adept in the unobtrusive use of the common pump.
Did I sing? she asked anxiously.
“No,” I answered. “Not anything to speak of.”
“Or play?”
“Well, the piano a little. Strum, strum, strum! I play at playing.”
That evidently pleased her. “You see, dear,” she admitted frankly, “it would be so bad for Me if a sister bearing my name went in seriously for music.”
“I appreciate your anxiety,” I answered frigidly.
This did not repel Mariana. Before she dropped me again at Auntie’s door, in the flats off Victoria Street, she had satisfied herself, I think, as to John Stodmarsh’s place in nature, and the desirability or otherwise of cultivating my acquaintance. We parted the best of friends. She gave me her cheek to kiss quite warmly this time, and begged me to come and see her soon at the Hôtel Métropole. “So delightful to meet you again, dear! — Home, Simmons!”
As she drove off with a nod and a smile, I felt sure she was congratulating herself that Rosalba, after all, had done nothing dreadful; and that if she was adopted by a distinguished lady painter, and about to marry a civil servant of means, she must be reckoned in the game as an element of strength rather than of weakness.
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br /> During the next eighteen months, accordingly, I saw much of Mariana — that spoiled child of fortune. After her first doubts were dispelled, she realised quickly enough that my position rather helped than hindered her in English society. “Her sister, you know, is engaged to Mr. Stodmarsh of the Local Government Board — a rising man, sure to get into Parliament and be a Cabinet Minister.” So Mariana made much of me. Uncle Giuseppe she kept judiciously a little in the background; though even Uncle Giuseppe had the natural savoir faire of the Lupari family, and being an Italian who spoke very broken English, was less likely to betray himself than if he had been born, like ourselves, in the parish of St. Paneras. I liked Uncle Giuseppe: he was the good-humoured nouveau-riche who exults in his prosperity with boyish pride. But Mariana took care he should not see too much of me. Uncle Giuseppe’s means were ample for one, but would be insufficient for two, as Mariana saw things. That was why, I now understood, she had been so anxious to say little about Uncle Giuseppe’s fortune when she wrote to me from Milan. He died a year later, and left Mariana everything. Mariana went into respectful mourning, provided herself with a paid duenna, and continued to sing and earn money easily.
“The Lupari” indeed became a fact in London. She sang sweetly in her demure, mouselike way; and her old-fashioned Italian habit of producing her voice in a level stream, without any of the fashionable French tremor, produced a great effect. Everybody spoke of her; bouquets fell like summer hail; her bosom, in last acts, was a blazing Golconda. I was introduced to strangers now as “the Lupari’s sister, you know — the one who is engaged to Mr. John Stodmarsh.” I took Mariana to see John, and also Dudu. I was a little afraid, I confess, of taking her to Dudu’s. Why afraid, you will ask — seeing that Dudu was the merest acquaintance? Well, I had half an idea that Dudu might admire her. And why not? Well, I was fond of Dudu — and he had painted me so often — and — a woman is a woman! I did not want that dainty Mariana to take my place as model.
But when I saw Dudu next after Mariana’s first visit, I asked him, a little tremulously, what he thought of her.
He paused and looked at me. “What I thought at the Monti Berici,” he answered after an interval.
I wondered whether I remembered aright. “And that was — ?” I inquired.
“That she is you — with the spice left out; you, without the flavour, the originality, the individuality, the savour; you, with no wilful petulance, no flashes of wickedness; in one word, you, with that attractive little devil of yours omitted.”
“Her dimpled chin!” I cried.
“Yes; soft and round. Yours has character. Soft, dimpled chins, like a wax doll’s, go with love of frivolities. They have no depth in them.”
“But — she is so very beautiful — much, much prettier than — than I am, for example.”
“Prettier — je vous Vaccorde — in the chocolate-box sense. A nice, mouse-like wee thing, with peachy-downy cheeks and long trembling eyelashes. The very model for a Christmas number. Lots of fellows could paint her — and do her full justice. There are faces that make one despair; hers is not one of them. She is the average brunette, pushed to the highest term of which the average brunette is capable; but one atom of fire, one particle of personality — nowhere. She would make what ordinary people call a likeness, not in any deeper sense a picture.”
“The English care more for likeness than for beauty,” I murmured.
“The English care more for prettiness than for soul,” he answered. “But a face like hers has no more than prettiness. Another face I know has so much deeper riddles in it — one has never finished reading it. ‘T is a face to make a man realise the impotence of his art. Its very perversities are endless. I could paint it all my life, and feel at the end I had not reached the end of it.”
“Still — her eyes —
“Can any mortal mixture of earth’s mould —
Dudu. Such eyes!”
“Mariana’s eyes? Mariana’s? A bird-stuffer could match them with bits of coloured glass and a wax fringe of long lashes Whereas there -are eyes — unfathomable — obstinate questionings of invisible things. Mariana! Nonsense!”
“Then — you will not dispossess me as model in her favour?” I asked, colouring.
“Dispossess you? What a question! Such obvious prettiness as hers! Dru, one crook of your mocking little finger is worth more than many Marianas. You are a Giorgione; she, a study by a meretricious Parisian painter.”
He was nothing to me, of course — nothing to me, who was to be John Stodmarsh’s wife; but — it made my heart leap to hear him say so.
Seeing Mariana brought the Italian homesickness nearer to me than ever. Italy draws; I longed for Italy. I love it still; I have never ceased to love it I shall not be satisfied till I have explored every nook from Friuli to Calabria. Nay, more, before Persephone claims me, I trust that I too shall have wandered in the fields of Enna.
Aunt Emily’s villa, where I write these lines, stands with its pink-washed walls on the terraced slope of the Monti Berici. A close screen of tapering black cypresses cuts it off from the olive-yard. Cicalas buzz there. From the round-arched loggia with its Corinthian pillars — antiques, I fancy — you look down past the gnarled mulberry-tree on the burnt-up grass-plot to the mouldering balustrade: and over the balustrade you may catch blue glimpses of the shining plain, or in the distance the Alps, just seen through the shimmering haze of Lombardy. Below, campaniles of neighbouring villages: Romanesque campaniles, with twin round-topped windows set high on their towers. Everything mossy and lichen-stained and broken-nosed, from the armless Apollo on the pedestal by the parapet to the nymphs that pour driblets of water, by green, oozy tags, from their cracked urn in the grotto by the arbutus. And that is Italy!
There, in Aunt Emily’s villa, whither he took me at last — But my inveterate habit of getting in front of my story has quite run away with me.
CHAPTER XX
THE BRINK OF THE PRECIPICE
MARIANA, in her rôle of elder sister, was able to settle the date of my birthday, which I had either forgotten or never known. As its twenty-first anniversary drew fatally near, bringing with it the penalty and forfeit of my bond, I became more and more aware of the hateful nature of my compact with John Stodmarsh. Mariana, of whom I saw much now, could not understand my unspoken reluctance to marry him:—” Such an excellent match — a county family, too — he will be knighted in time, they say, dear; at the very least knighted; and then you will be Lady Stodmarsh; perhaps, indeed, he may be made a peer before he’s finished. So sweet, a peerage! But even a knighthood is always something. It would be a splendid thing for Me if I could talk of ‘my sister Lady Stodmarsh.’” Mariana, turning her green-beryl eyes upon me in mild amaze, seemed to think it almost unnatural on my part that I should wish to deprive her of this innocent enjoyment She had hopes of a certain courtesy Lord Reggy for herself, and considered that even a knightly title for her sister might go some way on the road towards, securing him. She meant to exploit me.
She exploited most people. She had indeed a curious variant on the Midas gift. Whatever gold chanced to pass her way, Mariana’s little fist closed over it naturally.
As to Dudu, of course I spoke as little as possible to him about the matter. To speak of it would have been to court defeat. We would both have betrayed ourselves — and John. So I kept dead silence. But we looked the more. And our looks told us everything. Mine, reluctance; his, infinite pity.
Yet I flew right into it, none the less. A sense of honour, of my duty to John, made me forget my still clearer duty to myself as a woman. I admit I was wrong. I felt it in the sequel. But honour misled me; and I had no one to guide me.
Some weeks before the date arranged for our wedding, John spoke to me of his plans. It was a tawny autumn day, at Patchingham. We had climbed the sandstone ridge, where the heather was now brown and the wet bracken shone like burnished copper. Rain had fallen overnight, but the day was hot. A curdy white mist of winged seeds r
ose and floated from the basking spikes of willow-herb. All was dim and autumnal. It seemed to me a fitting day to discuss that grey event, my marriage.
“We will have to get a dispensation, of course,” I put in, when John paused in his remarks. “Without a dispensation, no Catholic can marry a person outside the Church.”
John stared amazement “You don’t mean to say,” he exclaimed, “after all the books I have lent you to read, you still believe that—” I think he was just going to say “that nonsense,” but he checked himself in time, and substituted for it the slightly less offensive phrase, “that mass of dogmas?”
I was firm, but quiet. “What I believe, John,” I answered, “is a matter for myself; what I wish to do is a matter for discussion between us. And I may as well confess at once that I should not be happy in marrying you unless I had a dispensation.”
“But you never said you were a Catholic,” he objected in his positive way. (I am not positive on the point, but I think John was a Positivist.)
“I do not say so now,” I answered. “It is a large proposition. Besides, I did not want to differ from you. One can believe a thing without protesting too much. One can dissent without dissidence.”
He eyed me suspiciously, as though he fancied I was making game of him. “Still, you have never confessed,” he said again.
“What need for confession? Our life at Miss Westmacott’s — so painfully blameless!” His face clouded. “Very well,” he said slowly; “if you really feel it necessary, Rosalba, to get a dispensation — . Though I should have thought, after all I have taught you — . And Miss Duddleswell, too, of whom you have seen so much, is a lady of such sterling logical qualities!”
