by Grant Allen
“C’est la mort? the priest murmured.
I felt my heart grow numb. After all, in life, one has but one mother.
Yet though I was conscious of a stone in my breast, I could not weep. The tears refused to come. Nor could I bring myself to feel that I had lost anything. Forgive me, you gentle-nurtured English girls, who have not known what it is to have a mother like mine. Grant me at least your pity.
I returned to Dijon late in the evening, after making the few small arrangements necessary for the funeral. I had left a note in London telling Auntie of my trouble, and asking her to lend me money for this last service, if Mariana refused to pay it.
The drive back was an eternity of terror. We passed through long ghostly avenues of gaunt black poplars; a chink of starless hardly showed through their summits. Yellow leaves still fell. The loneliness appalled me. And I must sleep by myself in that friendless city at the end of my drive — if it ever had an end. Still, the tears would not come. My eyes were hard balls; they burned internally.
After years of dark misery, I think, I alighted at the door of the Hôtel de la Cloche, where I had already engaged a room for that evening. The awful solitude of my position weighed upon me. I felt how civilisation had eaten into my heart of courage, for I could not help contrasting my shrinking awe that night at Dijon with the blithe stroll I took across the Kentish downs (singing like Christian after he had lost his burden) on the morning when I sloughed off the First Murderer.
At the door of the Cloche — Arthur Wingham was waiting for me.
With a cry of wild joy, I stretched out both hands. I had forbidden him to come, and exacted a promise from him; but I will not pretend I was not delighted to see him. After the forlornness of that long day, it was happiness to behold a face one knew and loved — even though one had forbidden it.
Convention went to the winds. “Dudu!” I cried. “You here! And you promised not to follow me!,”
“I promised not to follow you — Why, my child, how cold! You ‘re as blue as a plum!” He caught me up in his arms, as the roc caught Sindbad, and carried me into the square hall of the hotel. There he laid me down gently. “Here she is, Linda: exonerate me!”
Auntie rose from a lounge, very pale but sweet, and kissed me twice on each cold cheek. “Darling,” she said, “I can read in your face what you have suffered. Blame this journey to my account. Arthur came to me at Cambridge and explained everything. I have taken it upon myself to brave your veto, and to bring him with me. I am chaperon enough for both. I promised him absolution. Rosalba dear, you absolve him?”
I kissed her twice in return. “One for you,” I said, clinging to her. “And one — for him. Auntie dear, how good of you! This burden was more than I could bear alone. — Dudu, dear Dudu — thanks — for breaking your promise.”
I was glad they had come, but — how sweet of them, too, to remain at Dijon instead of following me to Saint-André! For if they had seen her, I do not think I could have borne it.
I went upstairs with Auntie, flung myself on my bed, and cried, and cried, and cried, and cried. The tears came now. Auntie held my hand and said nothing.
Oh, the luxury of a good long cry! the delicious unrestrained wallowing misery of it! Poor men, I pity them! They must bottle up their feelings; they must let their grief or their indignation smoulder. But we can throw ourselves down, bury our faces in our pillows, and give ourselves up with absolute self-surrender to an orgy of tears, a wild revel of wretchedness.
The doubt of God’s providence smote me still. Why did God give me such a mother?
Kyrie eleison! Christe eleison! Kyrie eleison!
And yet, even God cannot make the past not have been.
She was my mother.
CHAPTER XXIII
A REVELATION
WE waited at Dijon to bury that poor corpse. It was a religious duty. The Italian peasant attaches grave importance to the last rites of death; and in that matter I am still an Italian peasant. Antigone-like, I felt I must bury my dead, at whatever hazard.
It was a strange and lonely little ceremony — just Auntie, Arthur, the sombre priest, and myself; and we returned home silently to the Hôtel de la Cloche from the cemetery at Saint-André. How grateful I felt to my two dears for standing by me in this trouble I cannot put into words. To have performed that last office alone with the priest would have been more than a girl of twenty-one could easily compass.
May she rest in peace! If prayers for a troubled soul avail, she has mine daily.
Next morning, we set out on our return journey to England. England, dear England, have I railed at you at times? How I loved you that day, when I felt myself so far from you!
Two lands in Europe twine their tendrils ever deeper round one’s heart — Italy and England.
Auntie had telegraphed the hour of our expected arrival to her servants at the flat. When we reached home, tired and dusty, with Arthur in our train, I was astonished to find Mariana (in an amazing hat) waiting for us.
She kissed me, somewhat frigidly, under the shadow of the vast brim; but still, she kissed me. Mouse-like and demure as ever, with her soft dimpled chin enveloped in lavender gossamer, she was yet big with some strange news. She suppressed it with difficulty till she had asked a few decent conventional questions. “Dead! Yes; I knew; it was telegraphed to the papers. And you attended her funeral. I must explain that away. However, thank goodness, it is all right now. I have taken this matter in hand. I have explained away everything.”
“But to what do I owe this honour?” I asked, somewhat angrily; it would have been more becoming in Mariana, I thought, after shirking her plain duty, to have kept to her first resolution of ignoring me. “You know, you were never going to speak to me again.”
“Si, si; I know,” Mariana answered with an angelic smile. “I did not mean to speak to you — if you had wrecked my ship. However, it is quite unimportant now. I have found that woman out. I have manoeuvred the papers. I am arranging everything.”
I sank on the sofa, very pale and faint. Auntie supported me on her arm. “You must have a glass of wine,” she cried. “Arthur, run for the decanters! Pour her out some port. Or no, bring champagne; that is the best pick-me-up. It will restore her faster.”
Dudu rushed off to get it, and began unwiring the cork. I took no notice, but waved the poisonous stuff away with one hand. “What does this mean, Mariana? Do please be explicit!”
Mariana made no reply, but nodding her ostrich feathers with a triumphant air, handed me over a newspaper cutting.
It was a letter to the editor;
“SIR, — I see that in the telegrams relating to the recent atrocious crime at Saint-André the name of one of the sufferers is given as Signora Lupari, and she is described as my mother. I desire to state in the most emphatic way that there is absolutely no truth in this report, and that the woman in question is not related to me.
“Faithfully yours,
“MARIANA LUPARI.”
I handed it back to her with an indignant shudder. “But, Mariana, it is not true!”
“It is true, every word of it. Though, of course, when I wrote that letter, I thought it wasn’t.”
“True? What do you mean?” The room whirled and staggered.
“She was not our mother. Oh yes— ‘t is the fact; you need not stare like that. I am not mad. I am telling you the plain truth. A reporter from the Daily Monitor has hunted it all up, and copied out the documents. I’ll tell you how it happened.” She leaned back on the ottoman and prepared to deliver her news, looking winning as ever. “He came to interview me after my letter to the papers — they will come to interview one; ‘t is one of our drawbacks. Of course, I stuck to my story — tell a lie and stick to it.” She beamed and smiled in her filmy little wraps, all crépon and gossamer. “He insisted. I denied. He asked proofs. E via, e via. To get rid of him, I sent him off at a venture to the Italian church in Hatton Garden. Well, he went, and what do you suppose he found?” She handed me
some copies of documents from the register of the church and from the registrar’s office. I read them through, reeling. They were — the marriage certificate of Antonio Lupari and Chiara Lanzi; the certificates of birth and baptism of their two children, Mariana and Rosalba; the certificate of death of Chiara, wife of Antonio Lupari; and the certificate of the marriage of Antonio Lupari, widower, with Bridget Mahoney, spinster, six weeks after the death of his first wife, our mother.
“These are all true?” I asked suspiciously.
Mariana, who had been occupied meanwhile in sucking the tortoise-shell ball in the eagle’s claw, handed them across to Arthur for examination. “True copies,” she cooed back in her dove-like voice. “Officially certified.”
“But why did father never tell us?” I cried.
Mariana extended her pretty gloved hands before her, to show the palms, with an Italian gesture. “How should I know?” she rippled on, raising her dark lashes and lifting her languorous eyes to heaven. “Perhaps, procrastinator, he kept putting it off from time to time. Perhaps, prevaricator, he was ashamed. Perhaps, unfeeling, he thought we might find out he had married that woman only six weeks after the death of our mother.”
“And our real mother?” I gasped out. Mariana rearranged her coquettish red neckerchief — fluffy crimson silk gauze, tied loosely around the throat — with very deliberate fingers. “I have been to the Italian church myself,” she said in her bell-clear accents, still toying with the neckerchief, “where I have seen and conferred with old Padre Marchesi. He remembers our mother — a very good and devout woman, he says— ‘Una bellissima signora; un’ anima veramente divotaI!’ — and also a most graceful dancer. She had a taste for poetry, too; do you recollect an old Dante, dear, and a tattered Shakespeare that we had knocking about on the Monti Berici?—”
Did I remember them, indeed? Did I remember the treasured delights of my childhood?— “Si, si” I cried. “Mi ricordo.”
“Well, I think they must have been hers,” Mariana went on, withdrawing one fawn-coloured glove to finger a pet sapphire. “And I have no doubt it was from her that! Myself have inherited my artistic temperament” Mariana looked down at her No. 3 boots, very neatly laced, and let the long satin eyelashes fringe the downcast eyes with becoming modesty.
“But She — the other one — she was not our mother!” I exclaimed, my heart rising tumultuously.
“No,” Mariana answered. “She was not. So if only I had known sooner, you might have been spared a long journey. I have no doubt it must have been an annoying and troublesome bit of business.”
“It would have made no difference to me,” I answered. “I should have gone all the same.” One cannot get rid of ingrained beliefs and ideas in a moment. I thought she was my mother; I felt she was my mother; unkind to me, unjust to me — but still, my mother. I should have gone to see her die; I should have gone to bury her.
“How pale and flurried you look!” Mariana broke in, on a clear, low note. “Mrs. Mallory, she is fainting!”
I staggered over to the table, and took the bottle from Dudu’s hands. Then I poured myself out a good glass of champagne, raised it aloft, and drank it. It was the first wine that had passed my lips since the night when I solemnly renounced it as a child on the Monti Berici.
Auntie drew back, a little surprised, for she knew my repugnance. There was questioning in her glance. “I am not afraid of it now,” I answered, smiling, for the champagne put fresh force into me. “If I am not her child, thank God, I have no cause to be afraid of it.”
“You need it,” Auntie answered, laying her cheek against mine. “This is a great revulsion.”
“Auntie,” I said, nestling towards her, “do you remember, I told you at Dijon she died evidently anxious to tell me something? It was that, I feel sure. She tried to speak, but had not strength to frame it.”
“Well, I have made it all right, anyhow,” Mariana cooed on in her calm sweet voice, unperturbed as usual. “The reporter brought me these things, and I beamed on him when I had read them, ‘You see, I told you so!’ I did not let him guess what a discovery he had made and how great a surprise it was to me.
I kept my countenance like a sphinx, and merely said, ‘You see, I told you so! Now, you can publish these facts — it will show your enterprise. You can describe how you hunted up the family records, and how you found I was right; my mother died just twenty-one years ago, in giving birth to my sister Rosalba. It is all perfectly clear; you can print your evidence. Only, I offer you a ten-pound note — first and only offer — no advance entertained — if you consent to suppress the certificate of the second marriage. You having hunted the matter up, no other reporter will think of checking it. Ten pounds — ready cash; no second bid; is it a bargain?’ And he took it like a shot. Here’s the report, as you see. It disposes once for all of that ridiculous rumour.” Mariana fanned herself.
I read it, dazed. It mentioned the facts of Antonio Lupari’s marriage, the births of his children, and the date and certificate of his wife’s death. “Miss Rosalba Lupari, the prima donna’s sister, has gone to Dijon,” the paragraph continued, “to represent the family at the funeral of the victim of the recent outrage, who was the widow of a certain Signor Lupari, belonging to a village near Vicenza.
The lady in question was connected by marriage only with the well-known singer.” It was the literal truth — but the truth severely edited. Mariana smiled with conscious pride and self-approval. She had saved us both, she considered, by a well-worded paragraph, from an atrocious scandal.’
“But why have you kept us in the dark so long?” you ask. “Why have you deluded us into the belief that you were the daughter of a drunken mother? You have harrowed our feelings for nothing, and alienated our sympathies. Why could you not have hinted as much from the beginning? Why could you not have allowed us to guess for ourselves that you were not her child?”
Simply because to have done so would have been psychologically untrue — a violation of my Method. I did not know the truth myself till that moment; had I let you gather it too soon, I would have given you a false sense of my position. But deeper than even that artistic need is this feeling to me — that I could recognise then and ever afterward how instinct had half told me this secret beforehand. I always loved and revered my father; I always felt I was far more his child than that grotesque Irishwoman’s. Whether it was nature speaking to me or not, I know not; but even when I thought her and called her my mother, I never regarded her in the same light as I regarded my father. She was not near enough.
Had she been flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, could I have felt such a repugnance to her? Would it have been in me to feel it? I doubt it.
But I fell on my knees in my own room that night and thanked Heaven fervently for a great cloud lifted.
CHAPTER XXIV
A TRANSFERENCE OF FEELING
IN the morning, before office hours, John called round to see me. I was not quite dressed, but I tidied myself up a bit, and hurried out to him, looking a perfect fright, I don’t doubt, uncomfortable and awkward. I felt hot in the face; my fingers twitched nervously. John, for his part, was austere and rigid; polite, in his close-shaven way, but ostentatiously forgiving. “I have to condole with you on your loss, Rosalba,” he said, holding his glossy silk hat in his hand before him as if to mark the casual nature of his visit. “Though I understand, of course, how many circumstances mitigate it. In fact, I suppose we may venture to admit that this is one of those cases where condolence need not surpass the limits of a decent observance.”
“The loss touches me even less than you might imagine, John,” I answered. And I went on to explain to him how Mariana and the reporter had made a joint discovery.
John just raised his faintly pencilled eyebrows, which were colourless, like so much of him; the thin lips grew thinner. Then he examined the newspaper cuttings one by one, and scanned the copies of the certificates closely. “These would seem to be in order,” he murmured, “q
uite in order. And that being so, my dear child, I venture to say it is all the more to be regretted that you chose to run counter to my expressed wishes and expose yourself to so serious a loss in life — all for the sake of a wretched woman who turns out, after all, to have been wholly unrelated to you!”
“I did what I thought my duty,” I replied stoutly.
“Views of duty differ. They differ — fundamentally. However, I do not wish to enlarge upon that debatable subject I am no longer your guardian. Day before yesterday, you may recollect, you attained your twenty-first birthday.”
In the turmoil of those times I had quite overlooked it.
“I come now,” John continued, a little un easily, in his civil, mechanical voice, “at this unaccustomed hour, to discuss your future. When you started for Dijon, you clearly understood, I believe, the seriousness, the irrevocability of the step you were taking. I explained it in full to you.”
“You did, John; and I accepted your intimation.”
“You realise, then, that our engagement is at an end?”
“I realise it altogether. I acquiesce in your decision. Our compact, I think, was an error from the first; this episode has supplied us with a convenient occasion for retreating from what was for both of us an untenable position.” Somehow, one could not talk long to John without dropping by degrees into his official manner.
He looked pleased at my submissiveness. The corners of his rigid mouth relaxed. “I am glad you recognise that,” he said, twisting a button. “It was, as you say, an error for both of us. I regard it as a mistake for a man to marry out of that circle in life — you understand my meaning. I regard it as a mistake for a woman to attempt to rise, or to be artificially raised, above that class for which nature intended her. I had seen this for long; but the sense that I was indebted to you — had put myself under an implied obligation to marry you, by educating you above your natural level — prevented me from endeavouring to break off what I was beginning to consider a one-sided arrangement.”
