THE POT OF BASIL
BY
BERNARD CAPES
AUTHOR OF
“A JAY OF ITALY,” “BAG AND BAGGAGE,” “JESSIE BAZLEY.”
LONDON
CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD.
1913
NOTE
For the attempt here made to endue with life and circumstance a little tragic romance of the past, the motive is to be referred to a recently published book of memoirs, in whose pages is incidentally made public for the first time the brief legend of which this is an amplification. The author hopes that he will not be thought to have dealt profanely with the spirit of a little tale, so old, so new, and yet so touching in its eternal simplicity.
CONTENTS
[XXIII. “In the Silent Woody Places”]
[XXVII. The Cry in the Garden]
[XXVIII. A Posthumous Existence]
THE POT OF BASIL
“Fair Isabel: poor simple Isabel.”
CHAPTER I.
THE NIXIE
It was a very hot day in Colorno, the petty Versailles of the Dukes of Parma. The little channels irrigating the plains all about, and drawn every one from the near depleted basin of the small river which a few miles northward ran into the Po, were spun as thin as silver wire. The effect from a distance was as of a network of snail-tracks, stiffened in a dry morning, and all making for the oasis of the village, where was to be found at least the shade of trees and gardens. Elsewhere there was little. The domains of Don Philip, wrote the Minister Maulevrier, à propos some hounds “de toute beauté” presented to the duke by his devoted father-in-law, Louis XV., were no huntsman’s paradise, since they possessed “ni bois, ni fauve.” The country was like a green tray, rimmed by the low blue ramparts of the Alps and Apennines far distant. In the midst stood Colorno, a dainty confection, as it were, of puff paste and sugar. It lay basking in the sunlight, very white, very sleepy, very empty. Its duke and court were at the capital, ten miles southward, Madame Louise-Elizabeth, its restless scheming duchess, was hastening towards her cruel end at Versailles—she was to die, like her father, like her husband, like her son, like many another relation, of the common scourge, “la petite vérole”—and only the three children of the marriage remained ensconced, for purposes of health and education, at the “résidence d’été.”
This country house, “élégante et spacieuse,” this Colorno itself, are very meet in these days to point the moral of vainglory. The palace, where the “Well-beloved’s” eldest and only married daughter wasted her heart and her brains in the persistent endeavour to find kingdoms for her offspring, as lesser mothers try to find “situations” for theirs, the despised home, where “ne cesse de parcourir la carte d’Europe,” chasing this or that crown to its imaginary resting-place on the head of husband or child, has been transformed into a lunatic asylum; the balcony, whence our Juliet leaned to whisper honeyed phrases to her Romeo, is either gone, or witnesses to the rhapsodies of a baser madness; the contiguous houses, where officers and ministers and envoys plenipotentiary kept their state, the lodgings where the smaller fry of parasites and courtiers worried out their little excited lives of intrigue and scandal—all are delivered in this twentieth century to the dry prose of commerce, and only the gilt tracery on a wall here and there, or the sombre emblazonment of a ceiling, testifies to the romance which once glowed and fevered there until it perished consumed in its own heart-burnings.
The palace has achieved, one might say, its logical destiny; it survives, but in a bad state of repair mental and material. The ducal gardens also survive, but for the benefit of the “people.” Everywhere, since those days, the flood of democracy has broken through the social dam, and robbed exclusiveness of its most picturesque privileges. It was predestined, it was inevitable; but I prefer, I confess, for my part, to think of Colorno as it lay slumbering, before the vulgarising cataclysm, on that sultry June morning in the year 1759.
There came lumbering up the high road from Florence a great travelling carriage drawn by four bays, with a sober-suited postilion to each pair, and a couple of travellers, no more, within. One might have known that the younger of these men—though plainly enough dressed in a suit of black velvet, with his head in a powdered bag-wig and a simple black beaver set on it—was, from the very serene authority of his expression, a person of particular distinction. He was, in fact, the Archduke Joseph of Austria, heir-apparent to God knew what dominions (the Seven Years’ War was then in the fourth of its perennial stages), and on his way home from a minor diplomatic mission—with which, despite his youth, he had been entrusted—to the Court of Rome. He travelled incognito as the Comte de Falckenstein, and, for the moment, had elected to eschew display. His entourage, his personal equipage, had preceded him on the road; he himself desired to lag a little for purposes of observation. For he was always observing, was Archduke Joseph, and provisionally amending the scheme of things after a process, despotically philosophic, which was all his own.
The archduke, aetat. 18, concluded a pretty prolonged silence with an aphorism:—
“The last acquirement of ambitious minds, my good Tiretta, is simplicity.”
The gentleman at his side, a humorous, interesting-looking young man of twenty-six or so, heaved a profound sigh.
“At last!” he said. “I may talk, then, again?”
Joseph sniggered. His own lean young face was not without humour, but intrinsically of the pedantic order. He was precociously inclined to that form of superior banter, best described as scholastic jocosity, which consists in demanding subservient laughter from the unamused. That was largely the misfortune of his state. He was a serious, well-intentioned young prince; but since no one might question his conclusions, they were forced to be their own single support. He had Platonic ideals of state, but the individual liberty they embraced included no right to question his personal dictation of them. He would make men tolerant by intolerance, which was exactly what the Jacobins, by savager methods, came to attempt; and necessarily like them he failed. He meant very well, and, under the circumstances, did not do so badly in the end; but he died, after all, in the van of pathetic failure, seeing all his hopes of a world converted by force to reason overthrown. That, however, belongs to another story.
The archduke’s aphorism had capped some discussion, terminated by himself, on the notorious dandyism of the Duke of Parma, through whose territories they were then passing.
“You may talk, Tiretta,” he said. “Why not?”
“God and your Highness know,” answered the young gentleman. “I would rather go without food than speech any day. And yet you impose silence on me; and yet you condescend to call me your friend.”
He was a romantic-looking fellow, for all the character he gave himself—slender, shapely, with dusk mournful eyes and well-knit features. His mouth was peculiarly expressive, whether in smile or sobriety, and the voice, whose freedom he so coveted, was low-toned and caressing. He wore the nondescript military harness of his day, scarcely to be called a uniform, consisting prominently of a dark blue coat with white facings, high jack-boots, and a heavy sword at his side. His natural hair, of a deep brown and slightly grizzled with powder, was tied into a knot at the nape with a broad black ribbon, and on his head was a hat like his companion’s, but adorned with a pert black cockade.
“I am your friend, Tiretta,” said the prince. “That is why I will not let you talk too much. You will profit by it some day, when I have inured you to a wise reticence. The man of many words empties his heart of thoughts.”
“I could plead,” answered Tiretta, with a little curious amused glance at his companion, “that thoughts, like pea-blossom, throng the thicker being culled; only I fear——”
“Fear what?”
“That you would wish to think it over.”
Joseph laughed. “Well,” said he, “deliver yourself.”
“I can be reticent,” said Tiretta. “I will talk your Highness an hour by the clock to prove it; and all the time you will never guess the secret I am keeping from you.”
“What is that?”
“That you have a smut on your nose.”
The prince instinctively rubbed that august feature; then, his lips a little stiff, sat looking out of the window. Certainly his indulgence had brought this on himself. He had met and attached this Tiretta to his interests in Rome, where the stranger was known socially as il Trovatore. Already and always a student of humanity, there was something about the man, a mystery, a charm, which had curiously puzzled and attracted the royal young metaphysician. Not that Tiretta had made any mystery about himself. If he was a soldier of fortune, he was still a soldier and a gentleman. He had fought with distinction, on the Spanish side, in the wars of the Austrian succession; he had been present at the battle of Piacenza. It was nothing, in that “general post” of kingdoms and dynasties, that he should find himself presently hobnobbing on friendly terms with a scion of the house whose claims he had helped to contest. The European arena was all a welter of Habsburgs and Bourbons, crossing, interlacing, intermarrying, and having no particular aim in common but, like a litter of pigs, to empty among them the Continental trough. It did not seem much to matter which sat on what throne, so long as all available seats were occupied by themselves. A martial spirit, with no genius for genealogy, might very well, under such conditions, fight for the sake of his sword rather than his cause; and likely that had been the case with Tiretta. He was a mercenary, of the noble and romantic sort; a free-lance, whose independence of mind shone through all his undertakings. There is no permanence in the attachments of princes; but, for the moment at least, it was this very quality of “self-possession” in his friend which interested Joseph; and because it seemed the antithesis of his own. Tiretta possessed his own soul apart, not by philosophy, but by some secret bestowal of it in a dreamy Rosamund’s bower, to which only he knew the clue. When his eyes looked fixed and misty, one might surmise that he was far away in that enchanted spot, the spirit of which always appeared to speak in his voice and manner. There was something magnetic about the man, which, in the philosopher’s view, invited scientific analysis.
And yet the fellow was an irrepressible chatterer—that was the odd thing; and wont, like all chatterers, to blunder into offence. Here was an example.
Archduke Joseph tried to swallow the pleasantry, but his vanity was not equal to the effort. He swelled a moment, then delivered himself, with an icy hauteur:—
“You presume, monsieur, you presume upon my indulgence. That is not to justify my condescension, but to rebuke it. Henceforth I desire you to leave me to my meditations.”
Tiretta, instantly compunctious, ventured to disobey. He was easily attached; he really liked the young man. His expressions of contrition won favour after a time; he earnestly asserted that he was not the irresponsible garrulous magpie the other thought him—that in the causes of loyalty and affection he could be silent unto death. Let his Highness test him and believe. Joseph smiled. Too much protest, too many words.
“I mistrust all excess—even of fidelity,” he said.
“Your Highness begins, your Highness has said it,” cried Tiretta, “where ordinarily old age is content to end—in the last wisdom of simplicity. Be tolerant of us commoner minds, who, being little, cannot afford, like your Highness, to do without some ostentation, even in speech. An emperor can dress plain, can dismiss his escort, can sit in silence self-contained, and remain an emperor. But we must e’en have some garnish of embroidered coats and sounding words to recommend us. Well, talking, like drink, grows on a man. So you give me your liking, sum me up as a wind-bag, only a fond one.”
“I shall do nothing so foolish,” said Joseph, with a smile. “There is no human nature, my good Tiretta, compounded of such simple ingredients. To call a man a rogue, a fool, a miser, or what you will, is the mere refuge of an indolent mind, which seizes upon some salient feature to express the whole. Remark upon a man’s dandyism, as we have been doing, but do not call him dandy; remark upon another’s loquacity, but do not dismiss him as an empty chatterer.”
“Do not dismiss him at all,” said Tiretta gravely. “He will justify your interest in him yet.”
He chaunted softly a little odd song (they were rolling over smooth turf at the time)—something about a quarrel between a flower and its roots, which he improvised for the occasion. It was his faculty for doing this sort of thing which had procured him his name. He had a very sweet voice. His mandolin rested in its case in the rack above his head. Joseph had little ear or liking for music; yet there was a quality in Tiretta’s which constantly fascinated while it aggravated him.
“If you would condescend to prose,” he said drily.
“It was this,” said Tiretta. “The flower despised its own lowly roots, its poor relations, which connected it with the soil. ‘I would stand alone in my exclusiveness,’ it said; and it persuaded the scythe to sever it. But, lo! the flower fell and died, and the roots sent forth another blossom, fair as the first.”
The archduke patted the shoulder next him patronisingly.
“What does it mean, poet?”
“Nothing, sir, but that, stand a flower ever so high and glorious, the roots have their use. All life springs at one time from the soil.”
“What is the moral?”
“O! the moral? Only that I love flowers.”
“Well, you are a funny fellow.”
“For being a root? It is natural for you to think so. But I shall hope yet to prove my attachment.”
The prince glanced at him queerly, as if doubting his sanity; then frowned, and sat looking from the window.
The postilions had had orders to avoid both Parma and Colorno. There were private as well as state reasons for this step. The past month or so had been signalised by some cautious pourparlers in the matter of a suggested marriage between the heir to the Austrian throne and the eldest child and daughter of Don Philip, and both policy and punctilio forbade a visit which might lend itself to misconstruction. If any curiosity as to the person of his possible bride affected the sedate young gentleman, he had no difficulty in repressing it. A glimpse had perhaps acted upon him to rasher effect. For, for all his youthful philosophy, Joseph was susceptible where girlish beauty was concerned. He even fell in love, years later, with the looks of his own sister, Marie-Antoinette, at Versailles, and playfully regretted that he could not marry her. Reports, of course, of the charms of the young Infanta Marie-Isabelle, had reached him; but then he was wise enough to recognise that princesses were always beautiful. It was without emotion that he saw the roofs and towers of Colorno appear and disappear at a distance among the eastern greenery.
The carriage took a ford of the little river, and toiling up the slope beyond, was proceeding on its way to join the Milan road, when it was called to a sudden halt by the archduke.
“Tiretta!”
“Your Highness?”
“That was a bewitching vision.”
“It sits very prettily among its trees, to be sure.”
“Pooh, man! Get out and look back.”
Tiretta obeyed—and this is what he saw. The road ran straight across the river, and within the south-eastern angle made by the two was composed a little picture, very quaint and ravissante. It showed a leafy corner shadowed by chestnut trees, and a patch of green-embowered turf beyond, sloping to a tiny curved backwater, in which lay a miniature islet set like an aquamarine in a ring, the whole lying secluded from the road behind a high close hedge of tamarisk and juniper, in the thick of which was sunk a wooden wicket. But between the bank and islet was the wonder; for there, thigh-deep in the water, stood a young girl, plainly arrested in the act of reaching for a single golden lily which floated in the pool a yard or two beyond her grasp. There she stood, half diverted, half aghast, balancing herself by an overhanging branch, one slim arm raised, so that its sleeve dropped down almost to her arm-pit, the other, snatched hurriedly from its essay, pressing under to her knees her rebellious skirt, which yet would rise and rise again in snowy bubbles. The naiad’s umber hair had looped astray; the little milkmaid hat upon her head, with its cherry ribbon and saucy bow, was tilted askew; she stood transfixed a moment; then, with a laugh and shrug, turned and waded ashore.
An odd small face, peering from the green, greeted her. Then both disappeared, and only the swirling bobbing lily remained to tell of the picture.
A voice spoke at Tiretta’s side. The archduke had alighted.
“Fantastic, lovely—a spirit of the beautiful water. How the sun and shade fought for her face, her bosom! Tiretta.”
“Sir.”
“I would not willingly forget that vision. See, take this ring” (he pulled a green intaglio from his finger)—“carry it to her; say that the Count of Falckenstein presents his duty to the nixie of the pool, and begs her to accept of this gage in token of his thraldom. No delay—not a moment—or you will be too late.”
Tiretta, in his jack-boots, splashed back across the ford. He found the wicket unfastened, and entered; a short hedgy lane carried him to the chestnut trees and the patch of sward over against the islet. He half expected to find the apparition vanished beyond recall—a dream, an hallucination. But there she stood withdrawn into the green, a flushed and laughing reality. Her sodden skirts clung about her; they were hemmed with mud as if, a lily herself, she had been uprooted from the water; her raised hands sought to restore symmetry to her disordered locks; there was a gleam of snowy teeth, a flush of translucent rose—he thought he had never seen a picture so captivating. And hovering about the vision’s footsteps was a little grotesque boy, comical, preposterous—a dwarf in fantastic keeping.
He advanced; she saw him, and was stricken into a stone-eyed Undine.
“Madam,” he said, “I bring a gage from the Count of Falckenstein yonder to the nixie of the water. He bids me say that he will redeem it at her will.”
CHAPTER II.
AQUAVIVA
If we are to accept the testimony of Louis XV., an experienced judge in such matters, the beauty of his granddaughter, eldest child of Don Philip of Parma, was in need of no servile flattery to recommend it. The little Infanta was, in truth, at seventeen, most that heart could desire, sweet, unaffected, full of charm and playfulness. Indeed, in the eyes of some, she erred on the side of condescension, being a little disposed, like her father, to familiarity with her inferiors. Yet, on right occasion, she could assume a pretty air of dignity, consciously summoned, one might think, to the protection of a yielding over-lovable disposition. She could not bear to hurt; and though she was wilful, and possessed, and could not always resist the temptation to indulge, a strong sense of humour, her atonements generally more than expiated the faults that induced them. To men, her eyes seemed always asking pardon for the cruelty of their own kindness.
The pretty princess was born in December. She arrived, “when all sweets were over, to bless the year,” even like our own little princess Elizabeth, who came with the snow one Childermas day, and passed away with it, like other holy innocents, in her brief spring. Isabella’s full name was Isabelle Marie Louise Antoinette—either so, or written in Italian, or Spanish, as you please. To her kinsfolk she was always Isabelita. They spoke French for the most part in Parma; for although Don Philip was a son of the fifth haughty monarch of that name of Spain, his royal spouse was by far the more forceful spirit of the pair, a true and steadfast daughter of France, and her will and tastes prevailed above those of her vain good-natured husband. Wherefore it was that this twelfth year of the duke’s enjoyment of his Italian possessions found the court largely weeded of its original Spanish dependants, and savouring more of Paris than of Madrid in its councils and pastimes.
Isabella commonly spoke French; and so, through long habit of resignation, did her gouvernante, the Marquise de Gonzalès, a fat old rabâcheuse, who, wishful long ago to escape this tiresome servitude of hers, had only been induced to stay on in view of the inability of the ducal exchequer to settle her account. She was a twaddling, scandalmongering old woman, who “passait pour aimer l’intrigue”—not the best mentor for an impressionable young girl, one would think. But, indeed, the old lady’s wits were never the servants of her inclinations, and I think Isabella measured her fairly enough, her pretence and her harmlessness, and was never, though she dutifully submitted, more or Jess, to her duennaship, in the least danger of imbibing from her principles derogatory to her maidenhood. At the same time the girl, not ignorant of the financial difficulties which had almost persistently beset the duchy, was prepared to suffer sweetly enough the almost arrogant show of authority which the Marquise’s consciousness of grievance emboldened her to assume.
The two drove out one fair June morning to visit the gardens of the queer old Aquaviva, a whimsical protégé of the young lady. They lay, these gardens, a mile or two from Colorno, along the right bank of the little river Parma, and were designed for nothing else than the production of perfumery. The gouvernante, hot and languid, elected to remain in the carriage under the shadow of a friendly group of trees; so Isabella alighted alone. She had hardly entered the garden, through a green gate in a hedge, before she was launched upon a very wilderness of flowers. Or at least so it might have appeared to one who knew nothing of the inner economics of that profuse and dazzling disorder. Here were roses, not by the bed but by the acre, bickering flame, as the heat-haze dances from the ground, of orange and crimson and scarlet; fields of jasmine in orderly rows, knitted in like hop-binds with horizontal stakes, and loading the air with perfume; plantations of yellow cassia, of jonquil, of tuberose, of geranium, each, on inspection, seen to be differentiated from all others, the whole forming a vast mosaic of flower groups, whose pattern symbolised the triumph of Aquaviva over some natural conditions obstructive of his enterprise. For Aquaviva, transferring at one time his little capital and his extensive knowledge from the flower-farms of Grasse in the Cannes Valley, where he had been horticulturally educated, to his native plains of Colorno, which were quite a degree higher in latitude, had had to circumvent and conquer many difficulties before establishing his gardens on the productive footing which was to make of them something more than a joy to the eye and a feast to the nostrils.
Isabella walked on, steeped, half drugged in the scents, which rose like incense on all sides. There were men working here and there, bronzed Italian lavoranti, who uncapped to Madonna as she passed, and felt the sweet place sweeter for her presence. She knew all its intricacies and details—the sheds for raising seed, the pergolas, the nurseries, the sunk tanks of water alive with wriggling gnat-larvæ, the little gleaming channels interlacing all. There was something about the riotous profusion of the spot, so greenly remote from the formal alleys and studied perspectives of Colorno, which touched a strange nerve in her as of some shadowy remembrance, the mystery of antique forgotten things. She loved it; and its owner and presiding genius, whom the marquise patronised and detested, was a prime favourite of hers.
Wending her way, everywhere by great bushes of lavender and rosemary, she came presently upon the old gardener himself, busy near the laboratory, a central bungalow where were achieved the processes of macération and enfleurage—otherwise the capture and storage of the world of fugitive perfumes which diffused themselves around. Aquaviva carried in his sinewy arms a pile of glazed stretchers, like small window sashes, or, a more appropriate simile in these days, like large photographic printing frames, and, seeing Isabella, he paused with a sardonic pucker of the lips.
“Ah!” said he, “I could have sworn it. A right morning for gadflies.”
His torso was like a lean-bellied fiddle, the string which bound his green baize apron round his waist helping the resemblance. Great bent shoulders and thin bent shanks had he, with enormous shoes to his feet and an enormous aquiline nose to his face. His expression was by no means truckling or conciliatory; he knew his value with the dames and exquisites of Parma.
Isabella laughed: “O, grandfather!” she said, “is that the way to greet your princess? See how I sting you with honey for your rudeness.”
“Hey,” said the old man, “hoping to make me drop my frames? But beware. It is the treasure of a dukedom I carry within them.”
She stretched up, and pulled at a frame, trying to peep.
“What is it, avolo mio? Is it lilies, jasmine, violets?”
“It is not for the common ruck. I tell you it is of the ducal brand—the essence of all flowers in one.”
“It is tuberose.”
“Spoken, Madonna, like an intelligent daughter. Between us we shall guess, sooner or later, what is his Excellency’s favourite perfume.”
“Why this is it, is it not?”
“Capital, on my faith. She has guessed it already.”
“Grandfather, I do not like you. I shall be severe. Tell me at once, is the grease on which these flowers are spread well purified in boiling water and nitre?”
“It is well purified, Madonna.”
“Has it since been boiled in a solution of rose-water and benzoin?”
“That is so, Madonna.” He answered with an amused, approving grin.
“And was the grease originally of choice selection?”
“The most choice, Madonna. The butcher who provided the ox who provided the suet is fourth cousin to a saint. The odour of sanctity is over it all from the first.”
“That is very good, then. My father will like to acquire sanctity so easily and so pleasantly.”
“True; on his handkerchief. But Madonna forgets one thing. The fat, thus impregnated, has to be dissolved in alcohol, a very devilish liquor, before the fragrance is released from it. Wherefore sanctity does not count in the result.”
“I was forgetting. So, after all, you brew wicked concoctions, grandfather. I shall ask to have you put in the escalero.”
“Not you. You would not hurt a beetle. Besides, where then would you get your scents?”
“I would distil them from the simple flowers.”
“Pooh! That is what fools imagine. But flowers do not yield their essence to torture, any more than truth comes out of the escalero.”
“I did not mean it really.”
Aquaviva looked at the girl with a grim smile, and wagged his head.
“You holy love!” he said. “How long are you going to keep me in torment with this load?”
She moved, with an exclamation of remorse, to let him pass. Going before her, he deposited his armful of frames within the bungalow, where were already heaped some scores of others.
“Now,” said he, turning round and rubbing his arms; “repeat your lesson, profumiere.”
She put her hands behind her back, as she stood before him.
“I boil and refine my grease,” she said, “in the flowerless time, storing ready a great quantity of it. When the flowers come, each in its season, I gather them and place them on these frames, every one of which is smeared thick with the fat, which has the property of absorbing their fragrance. I pile these frames one on the other to the number of—O, the heaps that you see there; and leave them thus, the light and heat penetrating, for——”
“Go on.”
“Ever so long a time.”
“From twenty-four to thirty-six hours will do.”
“That is what I meant. When the flowers have yielded all they can, I remove them and put fresh ones, and so on until the fat is so fully charged with their fragrance that it can hold no more. I then scrape off the grease, heat it until liquid, then strain it and pour it into bottles, ready for treatment by the perfumers, with their—with their alcohol.”
“Capital. Madonna has my certificate. And now about macération?”
“That is steeping the flowers in cold olive oil. Some, like cassia, answer better to such treatment.”
“Excellent! And so do not talk to me any more about your distillation, which is an inferior process applied only to the leaves, seeds and other parts of perfume-bearing plants, and in its results resembles no more the sweet breath of the blossoms than your ladyship’s vulgar camériste, Fanchette Becquet, resembles your ladyship.”
“Grandfather! What do you know about Fanchette?”
“Only what Bissy has told me, Madonna.”
“And what does Bissy know?”
“Ask him. He has all the wisdom of an owl. You did not come here unattended?”
“Madame de Gonzalès drove with me. She is sleeping in the carriage.”
“I warrant it, the old sluggard. If they shot women, she would be riddled like a pepper-box for a false sentry.”
“You must not speak so of my gouvernante.”
“Well, I will not. If it comes to that, I could forgive all Spaniards for your sake.”
Isabella turned, her slim tallish young figure suddenly erect.
“I will go and look for Bissy,” she said stiffly.
“You will find him in the orange-grove,” called Aquaviva, and returned, grinning, to his work.
Isabella had one of those small revulsions of feeling which sometimes came to her when, it seemed, her natural kindness had been presumed upon. But the mood passed quickly, as she walked beside the beds of flowers. She did not like to think of these pure things yielding their essence to fat; yet, after all, it was an emollient process, not unlike the susceptibility of her sex to soft flattery. She wondered if to lie on a bed of suet would have a persuasive effect upon her own soul, coaxing it to part with its fondest secrets; she was quite sure that distillation by boiling would have the opposite effect. Gardeners certainly were very wise people; they had learned the value of cold oil over hot in extracting the truth from shy natures. How cruel the world was! Would it ever learn in her time the illogic of torture?
Archduke Joseph, in his carriage not so far away, was already unconsciously formulating in his mind a like proposition. But he lived to answer it in an enlightened fashion.
The orange grove was Aquaviva’s pride. He had nursed it through long years into a flourishing condition; for in those latitudes, where snow often fell thickly in the winter, it was no easy task to protect and cherish the sensitive trees. The grove was situated in a little green glade near the river. So enclosed was it within trees and juniper hedges, so hushed and fragrant were its depths, one might have thought oneself in an antique bower sacred to love—a place where silence itself stole into blossom, and needed no more than the shock of a butterfly’s entrance to shatter it into a myriad scented stars. So still was it that the bubbling coo of a dove, the plop of a fish in the stream hard by, sounded, when they sounded, almost discordant. For true it is that noise, like size, is relative. The man who lives amongst engines can find balm of nights in “barking dogs and crowing cocks”; a student in a voiceless hermitage is driven to madness by a bluebottle.
The trees were all in flower; and, as if that were not fragrance enough, the grassy floor of the grove was sown everywhere with clumps of violets, many late blossoms on which still lingered out their beauty. They too needed protection, but in another way—protection from the sapping sun which the others loved and monopolised. So that here were light and shadow at their sweetest.
As Isabella entered the grove, she came plump upon the minor apparition she sought—Bissy, to wit, in shirt and breeches and an enormous straw hat. He looked like a gnome, who had taken refuge from a crow under a great mushroom, and come away with it on his head. Its weight seemed to bow his little legs, withal his important spirit walked unconscious of the burden. Or, rather, stooped at the moment, for Bissy, hands on knees, was peering intently into a violet patch, a basket of blossoms standing on the grass by his side.
Bissy, incidentally, was Aquaviva’s grandson and only relative. He was presumably a boy, but of unknown age. His squeezed elfin face showed the gravity of a man of forty. He took himself immensely seriously, regarding the flower-farm as his heritage, invited or merited no rebuke, worked solemnly within his limits, and took no fantastic risks. And yet the boy was in him somewhere, as naughty Isabella loved to prove by probing. It was just possible, so to speak, to scratch the horticulturist and find the mudlark.
“Bissy,” she said, a twinkle in her eyes: “what do you know of Fanchette Becquet?”
The imp did not even start. He just looked inquiringly round with his large owlish eyes, then straightened himself to his four foot six of stature.
“It is blood that amuses Mamselle Fanchette,” he answered promptly. “That is what I know about her, Excellency.”
“Blood, you nasty boy!” cried the young lady, with a little nose of disgust.
“Look you, Madonna,” said Bissy; “I know what I say. She comes to see the gardens once or twice, and to praise the scents—to ask them too: a little rose-water for her kerchief, some geraniums to put in her bosom, a spray of rosemary for her garters. She is a poor maid; her salary is paid irregularly—which I do not believe; she will justify the gift through her recommendations. But that is all nothing to her passion for the orange-grove. I tell her what I will tell you about these trees. They are grafted on a stock of lemon; they are planted in a good clayey soil, enriched with both animal manure and rotted leaf-mould; their roots are ventilated with plenty of broken charcoal. But since they are gross feeders, there is something else. It is blood from the butchers that they are greedy at times to drink; and it is that which pleases Mamselle Fanchette. Her eyes glitter like a tiger’s. ‘I like to hear that,’ she says. ‘They are brave trees, and earn their right to be the wedding tokens of women who love brave men’—and she sniffs at the blossoms as if she found a new savour in them. O, she loves blood!”
“You take a symbol for a sentiment,” cried Isabella—“you do, you horrid boy. I know Fanchette better than you, and she would not hurt a mouse. Why do you try to spoil my pretty grove for me. I think I will never come here again.”
“I should be sorry for that,” said Bissy gravely.
“Then do not say such things any more. What were you peering at when I came in?”
Bissy wiped his right hand on his breeches; then nipping the lady’s tender little palm in it, drew Isabella to the violet clump.
“Bend down and look in,” he said.
She obeyed; and there was a monstrous toad returning her gaze. Its golden eyes stared unwinking at her; its slow throat pulsated.
“Do you know, Bissy,” whispered the girl, after a moment’s pause, “that he has a wonderful jewel in his head.”
“Bagattella!” said Bissy. “Who told you so?”
“That is not respectful, Bissy. I know because I know—that should be enough for you. Come away, and I will tell you the reason.”
She had a lively imagination, and she “made up” on the spot:—
“When the first mother ate the forbidden fruit, she found a stone in it, which her little white teeth could not crack. So she took the stone from her pretty mouth and threw it away. But it was really the stone, and not the flesh, which contained the secret of the tree of knowledge, so that she gained nothing by her disobedience, as it has always been easy to see. But a toad, being the lowliest thing on earth, crept, and found the stone and tried to swallow it, which it has never been able to do to this day, though you may see it all puffed and swollen with the effort. For the stone stuck in its head, where it still remains for anybody to find.”
Bissy put out his underlip with polite incredulity.
“If anybody knows, anybody can have it.”
“Ah!” said Isabella; “you are a very clever Bissy; but there is something more. One must not take life in recovering the stone, since it contains the principle of all life; and therefore, if you kill the toad, as you must do to gain the stone, you will find nothing for your pains.”
“Which toad?” said Bissy.
“Why, this one.”
“But it is not the only toad in the world.”
“It is the only toad that matters to my story,” said Isabella. “What a little plague you are with your questions. Come, I want to see my golden lily. Is it full out yet?”
“Yes, Madonna,” said Bissy.
“I will race you there—quick—is anybody looking?”
The imp hesitated, glowed a little, then put himself in position.
“One, two, three—off!”
They ran across the grove, out of it by a green opening, and so on to the slope of sward bending to the backwater visible from the ford. Isabella, flushed and dishevelled, was first by a yard or two.
“O!” she cried; “the love! Bissy, I must have it; Bissy, I must.”
Gravity shook its head judicial.
“There’s no way but to wade; and through the mud.”
“Wade, then.”
“I am too little; and I have no love for the water, Madonna.”
“Then I shall go myself; and you shall look on.”
“I am your servant, Madonna; it is my duty to obey.”
“O, what an excellent servant! He will not stir from his post, though I drown.”
Laughing and wilful she stepped into the water, staggered a little, found her balance and went cautiously forward. The mud sucked at her dainty shoes, captured one, and still she was not deterred. She had almost reached the prize, when the sound of rolling wheels broke upon her ears. She paused aghast. We have heard what followed.
CHAPTER III.
THE COMPACT
Even as he spoke, Tiretta regretted, and blushed over, the nature of his mission. It was not its insolence—that was nothing in those days; it was its obvious misapplication. For here was no rustic Hebe, no frolic campagnarde, as he had at first inclined to suppose, but a damsel of position, as seemed somehow evident from her manner. That, eloquent to him of the inexplicable shibboleth of caste, told him, being a gentleman and a Gileadite, that he had presumed. He awaited in considerable trepidation her answer.
It followed, and without hesitation, witheringly enough.
“My will, monsieur, now and always, is to be spared the impertinences of strangers.”
If she could be more than gracious to her inferiors, Don Philip’s daughter could repel crushingly the undesired approaches of her equals. Tiretta, with a thorn in his heart, could not but observe, and admire, with what grace the bedraggled little beauty commanded the situation; how, sopped and ruffled as she was, she could triumph in her conscious indignation over unflattering circumstance. Her hair was tumbled, her pretty hat was awry; her two little feet peeped from their muddy fringe, and one had no shoe on it; yet, booted and martial as he was, she could make him feel his inferiority in a way that was at once a charm and a humiliation.
“Impertinence, madam,” he said, “is the last thing I made myself deputy for. If——”
She interrupted him: “You know the terms of your own service, monsieur, better than I. I would accept the lesser dishonour, if I were you, and go without more words.”
He flushed up to the roots of his hair.
“Do you see this, madam?” he said. He held out the green intaglio. “I fling it from me as I do your unpardonable innuendo”—and he spun the accursed thing from him into the middle of the pool.
Isabella, paralysed an instant, the next turned her back on him.
“Come, Bissy,” she said, “I need a gentleman escort, and you shall be mine to the carriage.”
But Bissy hung back. His eyes were fixed on the pool, his thoughts on the covetable plunder so wantonly—or happily—committed to it. Was it conceivable a man might dare for profit what he had refused to gallantry? The ring had shone and looked heavy; the water in the creek was daily sinking. And, even while he pondered, Madam de Gonzalès, flushed and peevish, hove into view, followed by Aquaviva in a state of dancing irritation.
The gouvernante paused, in heavy wonder over the tableau presented.
“Heyday!” she said: “What is the meaning of all this? Cannot I close my eyes a moment but you must be forgetting yourself and your position, little Infanta of Spain? An endless, insufferable task for one, is it not?” Her thick-lidded eyes travelled from Isabella to the stranger, and back again. “Who is this, and what have you been doing? My God, a fine state you are in! All dumb and confounded, too. Fie, fie, girl—don’t tell me it is an assignation!” She wheeled round on Aquaviva, red with fury. “It is a trick, is it? You have been throwing dust in my eyes, you infamous old scoundrel? You have been lending yourself to this tryst on the pretence of instructing her Excellency in horticulture.”
“Dust!” roared the old man. “It is the dust you yourself raise that blinds you. What do you all mean interfering with my work and disturbing the peace of my garden. I want nothing more than to be rid of the lot of you.”
“Isabella!” cried the gouvernante.
“I answer for myself, madam,” said the girl, her face quite pale and set; “and never, you may be sure, but with silence to insult. I am sorry you are displeased with my state, but——”
“Your father, the duke, shall hear of it,” cried the old lady.
“I will tell him myself,” said Isabella, “and of your interpretation of it.”
“It is a natural one, is it not?” said madam, but with a falling face.
“To the Marquise de Gonzalès,” said Isabella. “Shall we return to the carriage, madam?”
Tiretta, with a fine red on his cheek, came forward.
“I, also,” he said, “desire to answer for myself. The Count of Falckenstein——”
“Eh!” cried the marquise, with a little whisk and start.
“I said the Count of Falckenstein, madam, happening to cross yonder ford a few minutes ago on his road to Milan, encountered the vision of a nymph exploring these waters knee-deep in quest of lilies, and sent me with a compliment to greet the subject of so charming a picture. That, upon my honour, constitutes my share in this ‘assignation.’”
The old dame’s face, while Tiretta spoke, was a study. Perplexity struggled there with amazement and relief. She laughed, as he finished, on a little high note of understanding and indulgence.
“And it was very natural of his Excellency,” she said. “I, for one, decline to blame him for it. When rank forgets itself in such naughty vagaries as miss’s here, it must look to be accepted by strangers at its own valuation. Luckily, as you will please to inform the count, the like of this is with her Excellency a rare ebullition. She can do justice to her training, as you have heard; and I, though made the victim of the principles I have inculcated, can rejoice, at least, in such vindication of my teaching.”
She dropped, or rather heaved, a profound curtsey; and Tiretta bowed as profoundly—an obeisance in which he sought to include, furious as he was at heart, the object of this jobation. But Isabella, standing pale and haughty, was very far from responding.
“An apology, madam!” she said—“from us! He will please to inform the count! I think I have not heard you aright.”
“Pooh, child!” said the marquise good-humouredly. “You have heard; and I have heard. But it is possible we may draw different conclusions. Bon voyage, monsieur. We had some news of his Excellency’s passing.”
Tiretta rejoined his travelling companion, who during all this time had been chafing in his inability to detect what was passing within the enshrouding coverture of foliage. The archduke greeted him with some impatience.
“Well,” he said. “Did beauty accept the gage?”
“The gage,” said Tiretta, “lies sunk and damned to all eternity within the pool.”
“She threw it there?”
“I threw it there.”
“You, sir?”
“I, your Highness; and may you be damned with it before I consent ever again to risk being mistaken for your pander.”
The prince, shrinking amazed a moment as if he had been struck, stalked to the carriage, entered it, and sat down.
“Shall I walk?” said Tiretta, grimly, at the door.
The other hesitated; then silently, peremptorily, touched the seat beside him. Tiretta, without a word, occupied it, and the carriage rolled on its way.
Presently, urged beyond endurance, Joseph spoke.
“This is very amusing. You would appear to have met with some rebuff. Surely, in so harmless a gallantry, you would not blame me for consequences quite unforeseen. Is it injured vanity, or another’s innuendo, that saddles you with that hurtful title.”
“Another’s innuendo,” said the soldier shortly.
“The lady’s?”
“The lady’s.”
“She said?”
“She said, what the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Don Philip, was privileged to say to a poor devil approaching her with that insult in his hand.”
“It was the Infanta?”
“It was the Infanta.”
* * * * * * *
“Tiretta, my dear friend, tell me exactly what were her words?”
“She desired, sir, to be spared the impertinences of strangers; and when I answered with the respectful gallantry of my mission, she retorted as only a woman can retort with impunity.”
“A woman! Yet the vision of that child! I am sorry for you, Tiretta—and I am sorry for myself.”
“You have need to be.”
“Why? Did she know me for whom I was?”
“I can answer for the marquise; I cannot answer for her. Likely not; and, if likely, happily not; else I think you would find her more woman than child if you came to woo. Be content for that, if it pleases you. I do not fancy, from what I noticed, that the marquise will enlighten her. You can be sorry, provisionally, nevertheless.”
The young archduke gloomed, and was silent for a while. It was not that he resented the other’s freedom. Tiretta was constituted his privileged favourite for the time being, and might speak his mind liberally on most matters. It was rather, perhaps, that he cogitated the invidious position of princes, who, having austere far-seeing mothers to arrange matches for them, must accommodate themselves at bidding to double leading-strings, without being given a choice as to the partner with whom they were destined to run in couple. It made no difference that inclination in himself might jump with another’s policy. He would have wished to be free to woo in the sense that Tiretta, being of the small and independent, meant it. He did not fear the issue; he only coveted the free-will which would have lent a glamour to the pursuit. What if, after all, he were to find himself bound to one predisposed against him? He wished that she knew him, and knew him better; so, for the time at least, had that rebellious vision wrought upon his emotions. Presently, with a sigh, he looked up.
“She struck me as very beautiful, Tiretta,” he said.
“Well, I am prejudiced,” answered the soldier drily. “I cannot admire unkindness.”
“That is to be the true child you are,” said Joseph. “Affection is the only beauty to a child’s perceptions. Besides, you are not very susceptible, I think, to feminine attractions. I have observed that in you.”
“O! have you?”
“Come, Tiretta man, cheer up. After all, the young lady’s vindication of her position was the commendable thing. One might have regarded her escapade otherwise in a less admiring light.”
“So the keeper, no doubt, counsels resignation to the poor wretch he has caught and mauled in a mantrap.”
Joseph laughed. He thought the comparison, in their relative positions, ridiculous. Of course he did. What importance had this dear fellow’s feelings in the context? The point was that he himself might have been misrepresented to the lady. Following that train of thought, he fell into a profound meditation, from which he did not rouse himself for several minutes. Then he stirred, like a man who had come to a conclusion which was to be immutable and final.
“I wish,” said he, “satisfaction on a point or two—as to whether, for instance, that escapade argued a characteristic lack of dignity on the lady’s part, or was due merely to a rare ebullition of high spirits, instigated possibly by opposition.”
“Yes,” said Tiretta.
“I wish, if properly assured on that question, to ascertain what is the lady’s real opinion of me, and if she was led in any way to associate my near presence with the episode.”
“Yes,” said Tiretta.
“I am not a bad fellow,” said Joseph. “Am I, Tiretta?”
“You are a very good fellow,” answered the soldier grumpily.
“And I am not a bad friend. You, too, are a good friend—one, I am sure, who would be glad to explain his comrade in the best light to one whose good opinion his comrade coveted.”
Tiretta did not answer for a moment. His eyebrows were a little up, his lips a little compressed. Presently he opened them.
“Let us speak without equivocation,” he said. “You wish me to go and act the part of Paolo to your Francesca.”
Joseph smiled.
“To speak what your heart believes of me.”
“I am to talk of the fairy prince, of his virtues, of his graces, of his capacity for romantic love and more lasting affection.”
“Say the best you can of me.”
“Would you not fear Paolo?”
“No, no, my friend—his duty, his loyalty, his insensibility; and much more than that.”
“I flatter myself, you mean. Well, at least she would not flatter me.”
“It would be your chance to prove yourself to her; to rectify false impressions. In these matters troubadours are privileged.”
“Let me understand you fully. You think she may have formed a prejudice against you; you want that impression corrected. Are you to marry her, then?”
“It seems so.”
“And how should I be accredited?”
“Leave that to me. I will see that you are given the opportunity to approach her. The rest your heart will tell you.”
“We are to communicate?”
“And she and I, maybe, when you have paved the way. For friendship’s sake, Tiretta.”
“For none other, you may be sure. I do not like my task.”
“Put it into a song—into many songs. That will lighten it for you. I wish, for the occasion, I could sing myself. But, in spite of policy, I will woo my own way in this.”
He dismissed the subject in a little. Its temporary glamour evaporated. After all he had much, and of paramount importance, to think upon apart from it.
CHAPTER IV.
LOVE’S AMBASSADOR
The Italy of the eighteenth century has always given me a sense of distressing incongruity, such a sense of incongruity as I feel in the presence of performing animals, pitifully and patiently caricaturing their own native dignity in forced postures and mirthless habiliments. To see a petticoated elephant seated on a stool drinking tea, to see a dog on his hind legs, with a shako on his head, shouldering a musket, makes me, I confess, uneasy and ashamed. So in the land of the Visconti, of the Sforza, of the Medici, a land where both the magnificence of crime and the magnificence of achievement have always gone habited in a certain appropriate splendour, akin to that of the leopard in his forest and the tiger in his jungle, the vision of powder and patches, with their concomitants of mincing uncleanness and affectation, seems an outrage on one’s conception of the accepted fitness of things. If you would study that incongruity, as at least I feel it, in its more plausible phases, turn to the finer works of Canaletto; if in its grossest, read the memoirs of that arch-scoundrel Casanova—memoirs which to me, a fond enough student of the period in its prettier aspects, reek with that sort of fetor which gets into one’s clothes, as it were, and for a time infects all healthier savours.
The fact is, I suppose, that codes of manners and of conduct, evolved under particular conditions of society, are not always applicable to alien conditions. During the era of the aristocracy in England, powder and punctilio were some visible tokens of an amelioration in the old order of things, which had considered overbearance and pugnacity essential to the man of spirit; they spoke a real improvement in the attitude of class towards class; and, if that attitude was at first superficial, its practice gradually engendered the consideration which it had begun only by affecting. In Italy, it is to be feared, society adopted the code but eschewed its moral. All the observances, all the extravagances of an accepted fashion were seized upon by it with greed; only the underlying truth was never recognised or developed. The essential inhumanity remained the same; the arrogance of rank was unsoftened; torture survived without a thought of its outrage, not to man but to reason. Fashion, in its baser aspects, produced, I suppose, more preposterous fops in eighteenth-century Italy than in any other country of Europe. And all because that hot, vivid Latin race had accepted the imposition of a code which was quite alien to its blood and its instincts. It was not yet ripe for the change implied. It was idle dressing-up for a part it did not understand. It could not, in bagwig and velvet shorts, think Garrick and play Macbeth.
It is most natural to picture the monarchs and Infantes of Spain in trunk-hose and with bristling “stiletto” beards—fierce, haughty tyrants, of a piece with the colour and fury of their times. You must picture Don Philip, however, under a very different aspect. He sits at the moment at a table in his private cabinet at Parma, a rather solemn-looking macaroni of thirty-eight, writing, like Buffon, in lace ruffles with a gold pen, and appearing more concerned over the right balance of his toupet than over the equilibrium of the European concert. You would observe, were he to rise, that he has a defect, still noticeable though mitigated by the craft of his tailor. One of his shoulders is distinctly higher than the other, which gives him, in his efforts to correct the discrepancy, a rather stiff unelastic appearance. In his younger days, he was said, by flattering chroniclers, to possess, nevertheless, a charming figure. He had also an equable temper, which, for an Infante of Spain and son of that moody monarch Philip V. and his imperious spouse Elizabeth Farnese was something to his credit. It is more to his credit now, perhaps, that, through much and prolonged test of its qualities, his temper preserves its even character. He takes life, in fact, very easily, and has no objection in the world to have his wife described, and treated, as the better horse. He is quite willing to take the picturesque lead in the tandem while she pulls the cart of state. After all, he has played his effective part in the achievement of their present position, and has laurels, if rather withered ones, to rest upon. He was inclined as a youth, it was said, to the study of military science; and he has actually been a soldier, and has fought his way, and stubbornly fought it, to the enjoyment of these possessions of his, which were procured him originally through the persistent restless intriguing of his mother. Now, in the sense of prolonged security, he has grown slothful, and satisfied with minor triumphs, the greatest of which latterly has turned upon the successful nature of the negotiations for his daughter’s marriage with the Austrian Crown Prince. Isabelita is, it would really appear, to be an empress some day—not so bad a match for the daughter of only a younger son of Spain. Papa is very pleased, and inclined to regard the occasion as in the nature of a personal reward for years of, comparative, privation and ducal cheese-paring. He has not, in fact, to this day succeeded in bringing the profit and loss accounts of the duchy into line.
Now, as he sits writing, he strikes us as being a thought over-bedizened for the task and the hour, which is early. Everything upon him, you will remark, is conceived according to a taste slightly in excess of that which is the northman’s limit. His smooth-fronted toupet stands up eight inches from his forehead, and is surmounted by a roll of sausage curls, which descend to two veritable pains à café behind his ears; his cravat is a very muffler of Valenciennes, and is fastened by a brooch as big as a shoe-buckle; though presumably in négligé, he wears over a lace-ruffled cambric shirt, puffed from elbow to wrist, and garnished with mushroom-coloured ribbons, a pink silk vest covered with silver net; and shoes and breeches to match, dividing a space of white silk stockings, complete the elaborate picture. The only concession to business apparent about him is his ample loose-sleeved camisole; and even that is made of grey velvet lined with ermine. Altogether he suggests a Hogarth beau—a thing which, somewhat travestying fact in the artist’s own country, would pass for a faithful transcript here.
The room in which we discover his Excellency is small but appropriately furnished. There is a good deal of glass and glitter in it, a characteristic perfume, some bright sketches by Boucher and a Lancret fête galante; and as noticeable a feature as any is a great dish of sweetmeats, having a little table of rosewood with brass mouldings to itself. The duke is writing to his wife at Versailles. He sucks a comfit as he evolves without difficulty his periods. Simple souls, often better than intellectual, write good letters: I have known an ingenuous athlete express himself with a neatness and clarity I could envy without reaching. Here are some sentences which I extract, as pertinent to our story, from the ducal epistle:—
“All goes well, according to our latest advices; and the official demand for our daughter’s hand will certainly be presented to his Majesty your father within a month from this date. So far, so excellent; and the days when, in your own phrase, we lived like ‘ragamuffins,’ are buried even to their shadows. Let us have a mass said for their souls, poor things, for they possessed some virtues. ... We have here, lately arrived, the most popular chanteur since Farinelli. He comes, with a letter of recommendation to the Marquise de Ravilla from the archduke himself, and is to charm our daughter into love with a shadow whose approach she has dreaded a little. That suggestion is for your exclusive ear, ma mie. It emanates from one who is very cunning and very observant—the Gonzalès, no less; and is founded upon the presumed consciousness of somebody that he had belittled himself, his rank, and his moral stature, in somebody else’s eyes. You will recall that little incident of the carriage and the ford, as I passed it on to you in madam’s own words. Certainly, according to her, it had its effect upon an over-sensitive nature, predisposed, perhaps, to prejudice. Somebody had already been pictured to this frank nature, it seems, in the light of a philosopher and prig. She may not associate the two—the stranger of the ford, that is to say, and the philosopher—but she may come to, or may have her suspicions; and anyhow he may think that she does, and be anxious to eliminate at once a bad impression. So this Tiretta is despatched to play the part of Love’s advocate with offended beauty. I do not vouch for the truth of this, or endorse its policy; I repeat only for your private ear what the marquise of her shrewdness conjectures. She, for her part, is so sure of the truth of her surmise that she wants the man sent to Colorno, that there, amid romantic environments suggestive to the heart of contemplation, the points of his fond advocacy may be sympathetically pondered. She says that it would be flying in the face of love’s providence to frustrate somebody’s obvious purpose and design; that that impression referred to—whether it concerns itself with prig or roué, or, worse still, with both—is hardly one of happy augury for the future, and calls for exceptional treatment; that, in fine, if somebody has contrived this thing, somebody knows what he is about and has made himself responsible for his instrument.
“In the meantime, our newly-arrived improvisatore exhibits his qualities to triumphant effect. He is a soldier and a fine man; but this gift comes to him apart from his training, God knows whence. He will sing and rhyme you an hour on end; and, observe, he is very flattering, though veiled, in allusions to a supreme lord and comrade who possesses his heart.”
To these passages the sick duchess answered in due course, and with a characteristic warning, the whole gist of which may be conveyed in a single sentence:
“As to this minstrel, beware that the medicine, my Pippo, does not prove a drug, given for a definite purpose, but afterwards indulged in for its own sake”—a really preposterous suggestion, which it was incumbent on a cadet of Spain to wave aside with the briefest comment:
“You make me smile, dearest wife; you positively amuse me. The man is to be regarded, like a courier, as a mere vehicle for the conveyance of an august document of the heart. He would hardly commit the absurdity, I think, of associating his own personal insignificance with the message he was employed to deliver, any more than the fiddle, could it speak, would claim to be other than a vulgar structure of wood and string, obedient only to the hand of its master, and denuded of all importance the moment that hand was withdrawn. Believe me, ma chérie, the percipience of the unelect is not so negligible a quantity as you would seem to imagine. This instrument—if indeed an instrument it is—will play its part with a full sense of the momentary distinction that part confers upon it, yet without a thought but of sinking thereafter into the oblivion which is its necessary destiny. If it were otherwise, there remain means to persuade it. Yet it cannot be otherwise. I think I may answer for our daughter that she will entertain no delusions as to the relative values of the hand and of the instrument upon which it plays. Which, certainly, is quite enough said upon that small subject.”
Yet it was a very small subject who once crept through the keyhole of the King’s treasury and robbed his Magnificence’s coffers.
CHAPTER V.
IL TROVATORE
Isabella mistrusted few people and disliked nobody for long. She was one of those happily constituted girls who are troubled with no problems, have no quarrel with destiny, and never resent their not having been born boys. She had endearing looks and a fine spirit, but without self-consciousness in the one, or arrogance in the other. She was never in arms for the prerogatives of her sex, because it never occurred to her that they were being either questioned or abused. If she coquetted at all, it was more with women than with men; yet she was equally natural with both. As sweet a princess as Perdita—as sweet a milkmaid she would have been, had fortune deposed her. Impressionable, poor child—it was a pity only that nature, not sparing her the softest of hearts, should have done so little to protect its own rich achievement from harm. But nature, bent only on relentless propagation, designs these triumphant things as lures.
Isabella, during all her young life, had endeared herself with whomsoever she had visited. Grandpapa Louis, the cynic and impure, doted upon his charmante; haughty grandmamma in Spain had, on her death, left her the solitary bequest devoted by that opulent lady to her lord’s relations. Isabella did not want the money, but she wept over that proof of affection; while papa Philip tried not to weep, tears of chagrin, over being left out in the cold. However, in that dismal poverty of the exchequer, something to somebody was better than nothing to nobody; and I have no doubt that the legacy was taken into account in all subsequent dispositions of the young Infanta’s “household.”
Wealth, after all, is like the other things, size and sound, relative. We are not to suppose, you and I, that, because a certain thousand a year might appear to us opulence, a duke might not consider himself a pauper on fifty times that income. I do not know what the revenues of Parma represented to Don Philip in hard cash; I do know that he was constantly and piteously complaining to his royal relatives of his embarrassments. One man’s affluence is another man’s necessity; else you and I again might have criticised the expenditure of the Parmese Court, have commented on the waste, the idle profusion of a State, which, for mere vanity’s sake, must boast a superfluity of service which it was inadequate to support; have suggested a drastic economy here, a wholesale retrenchment there. We should have been assured, no doubt, that all that could be done had been done, and that only the indispensable remained—a possibly unanswerable statement from the opposite to our own point of view. From that standpoint the emptiness of the great palace at Colorno, during the absence of the Court, was so qualified an emptiness that its superfluous inmates could still have peopled a substantial villa or two, and left something over for emergencies, Besides the personal staff, which included attendants, preceptors, valets and grooms sufficient—with a lady of the wardrobe, two femmes de chambre, and some minor officials attached to Isabella alone—the gardens, the stables, the kitchens, the guard-house all gave indolent occupation to a small garrison of retainers, who, mostly idle and mostly gossips, numbered amongst themselves none, perhaps, quite so pert and so voluble as Fanchette Becquet, the Infanta’s first femme de confiance.
Fanchette, who hailed from Paris, had attained her present post more through private and particular interest than through particular merit. There were reasons for this, it was understood, which it was not necessary to divulge, but of which the girl herself was fully sensible, and of which she would have been the last not to take ample advantage. There was no high-born lady of the Court who presumed, or was allowed to presume, so much on her position as Fanchette. Her very audacity and insolence of retort possessed for certain masculine minds a charm which was a perpetual source of indulgence and profit to her. The duke himself had been known to suffer her impertinences with an enjoying relish which redounded in no ways to her disadvantage. In style and temper she was a veritable Parisian mondaine, dapper and pretty, though her lips were a little thin and her nose a little sharp. She had no heart at all, but her emotions, easily responsive to small provocation, blinded herself and others to that defect.