The
Confessional
by Edith Wharton
When I was a young man I thought a great deal
of local color. At that time it was still a pigment of recent discovery,
and supposed to have a peculiarly stimulating effect on the mental eye.
As an aid to the imagination its value was perhaps overrated; but as an
object of pursuit to that vagrant faculty, it had all the merits claimed
for it. I certainly never hunted any game better worth my powder; and to
a young man with rare holidays and long working hours, its value was
enhanced by the fact that one might bring it down at any turn, if only
one kept one's eye alert and one's hand on the trigger.
Even the large manufacturing city where, for some years, my young
enthusiasms were chained to an accountant's desk, was not without its
romantic opportunities. Many of the mill-hands at Dunstable were
Italians, and a foreign settlement had formed itself in that unsavory
and unsanitary portion of the town known as the Point. The Point, like
more aristocratic communities, had its residential and commercial
districts, its church, its theatre and its restaurant. When the craving
for local color was on me it was my habit to resort to the restaurant, a
low-browed wooden building with the appetizing announcement:
"Aristiu di montone"
pasted in one of its fly-blown window-panes.
Here the consumption of tough macaroni or of an ambiguous frittura
sufficed to transport me to the Cappello d'Oro in Venice, while my cup
of coffee and a wasp-waisted cigar with a straw in it turned my greasy
table-cloth into the marble top of one of the little round tables under
the arcade of the Caffe Pedrotti at Padua. This feat of the imagination
was materially aided by Agostino, the hollow-eyed and low-collared
waiter, whose slimy napkin never lost its Latin flourish and whose zeal
for my comfort was not infrequently displayed by his testing the warmth
of my soup with his finger. Through Agostino I became acquainted with
the inner history of the colony, heard the details of its feuds and
vendettas, and learned to know by sight the leading characters in these
domestic dramas. The restaurant
was frequented by the chief personages of the community: the overseer of
the Italian hands at the Meriton Mills, the doctor, his wife the
levatrice (a plump Neapolitan with greasy ringlets, a plush
picture-hat, and a charm against the evil-eye hanging in a crease of her
neck) and lastly by Don Egidio, the parocco of the little church
across the street. The doctor and his wife came only on feast days, but
the overseer and Don Egidio were regular patrons. The former was a quiet
saturnine-looking man, of accomplished manners but reluctant speech, and
I depended for my diversion chiefly on Don Egidio, whose large
loosely-hung lips were always ajar for conversation. The remarks issuing
from them were richly tinged by the gutturals of the Bergamasque
dialect, and it needed but a slight acquaintance with Italian types to
detect the Lombard peasant under the priest's rusty cassock. This
inference was confirmed by Don Egidio's telling me that he came from a
village of Val Camonica, the radiant valley which extends northward from
the lake of Iseo to the Adamello glaciers. His step-father had been a
laborer on one of the fruit-farms of a Milanese count who owned large
estates in the Val Camonica; and that gentleman, taking a fancy to the
lad, whom he had seen at work in his orchards, had removed him to his
villa on the lake of Iseo and had subsequently educated him for the
Church.
It was doubtless to this picturesque accident
that Don Egidio owed the mingling of ease and simplicity that gave an
inimitable charm to his stout shabby presence. It was as though some
wild mountain-fruit had been transplanted to the Count's orchards and
had mellowed under cultivation without losing its sylvan flavor. I have
never seen the social art carried farther without suggestion of
artifice. The fact that Don Egidio's amenities were mainly exercised on
the mill-hands composing his parish proved the genuineness of his gift.
It is easier to simulate gentility among gentlemen than among navvies;
and the plain man is a touchstone who draws out all the alloy in the
gold. Among his parishioners
Don Egidio ruled with the cheerful despotism of the good priest. On
cardinal points he was inflexible, but in minor matters he had that
elasticity of judgment which enables the Catholic discipline to fit
itself to every inequality of the human conscience. There was no appeal
from his verdict; but his judgment-seat was a revolving chair from which
he could view the same act at various angles. His influence was
acknowledged not only by his flock, but by the policeman at the corner,
the "bar-keep'" in the dive, the ward politician in the corner grocery.
The general verdict of Dunstable was that the Point would have been hell
without the priest. It was perhaps not precisely heaven with him; but
such light of the upper sky as pierced its murky atmosphere was
reflected from Don Egidio's countenance. It is hardly possible for any
one to exercise such influence without taking pleasure in it; and on the
whole the priest was probably a contented man; though it does not follow
that he was a happy one. On this point the first stages of our
acquaintance yielded much food for conjecture. At first sight Don Egidio
was the image of cheerfulness. He had all the physical indications of a
mind at ease: the leisurely rolling gait, the ready laugh, the
hospitable eye of the man whose sympathies are always on the latch. It
took me some time to discover under his surface garrulity the
impenetrable reticence of his profession, and under his enjoyment of
trifles a levelling melancholy which made all enjoyment trifling. Don
Egidio's aspect and conversation were so unsuggestive of psychological
complexities that I set down this trait to poverty or home-sickness.
There are few classes of men more frugal in tastes and habit than the
village priest in Italy; but Don Egidio, by his own account, had been
introduced, at an impressionable age, to a way of living that must have
surpassed his wildest dreams of self-indulgence. To whatever privations
his parochial work had since accustomed him, the influences of that
earlier life were too perceptible in his talk not to have made a
profound impression on his tastes; and he remained, for all his
apostolic simplicity, the image of the family priest who has his seat at
the rich man's table.
It chanced that I had used one of my short
European holidays to explore afoot the romantic passes connecting the
Valtelline with the lake of Iseo; and my remembrance of that enchanting
region made it seem impossible that Don Egidio should ever look without
a reminiscent pang on the grimy perspective of his parochial streets.
The transition was too complete, too ironical, from those rich glades
and Titianesque acclivities to the brick hovels and fissured sidewalks
of the Point.
This impression was confirmed when Don
Egidio, in response to my urgent invitation, paid his first visit to my
modest lodgings. He called one winter evening, when a wood-fire in its
happiest humor was giving a factitious lustre to my book-shelves and
bringing out the values of the one or two old prints and Chinese
porcelains that accounted for the perennial shabbiness of my wardrobe.
"Ah," said he with a murmur of satisfaction, as he laid aside his shiny
hat and bulging umbrella, "it is a long time since I have been in a
casa signorile." My
remembrance of his own room (he lodged with the doctor and the
levatrice) saved this epithet from the suggestion of irony and kept
me silent while he sank into my arm-chair with the deliberation of a
tired traveller lowering himself gently into a warm bath.
"Good! good!" he repeated, looking about him.
"Books, porcelains, objects of virtù
- I am glad to see that there are still
such things in the world!" And he turned a genial eye on the glass of
Marsala that I had poured out for him.
Don Egidio was the most temperate of men and never exceeded his one
glass; but he liked to sit by the hour puffing at my Cabanas, which I
suspected him of preferring to the black weed of his native country.
Under the influence of my tobacco he became even more blandly garrulous,
and I sometimes fancied that of all the obligations of his calling none
could have placed such a strain on him as that of preserving the secrets
of the confessional. He often talked of his early life at the Count's
villa, where he had been educated with his patron's two sons till he was
of age to be sent to the seminary; and I could see that the years spent
in simple and familiar intercourse with his benefactors had been the
most vivid chapter in his experience. The Italian peasant's inarticulate
tenderness for the beauty of his birthplace had been specialized in him
by contact with cultivated tastes, and he could tell me not only that
the Count had a "stupendous" collection of pictures, but that the chapel
of the villa contained a sepulchral monument by Bambaja, and that the
art-critics were divided as to the authenticity of the Leonardo in the
family palace at Milan. On all
these subjects he was inexhaustibly voluble; but there was one point
which he always avoided, and that was his reason for coming to America.
I remember the round turn with which he brought me up when I questioned
him.
"A priest," said he, "is a soldier and must
obey orders like a soldier." He set down his glass of Marsala and
strolled across the room. "I had not observed," he went on, "that you
have here a photograph of the Sposalizio of the Brera. What a picture!
È stupendo!" and he turned back to his
seat and smilingly lit a fresh cigar.
I saw at once that I had hit on a point where his native garrulity was
protected by the chain-mail of religious discipline that every Catholic
priest wears beneath his cassock. I had too much respect for my friend
to wish to penetrate his armor, and now and then I almost fancied he was
grateful to me for not putting his reticence to the test.
Don Egidio must have been past sixty when I
made his acquaintance; but it was not till the close of an exceptionally
harsh winter, some five or six years after our first meeting, that I
began to think of him as an old man. It was as though the long-continued
cold had cracked and shrivelled him. He had grown bent and
hollow-chested and his lower lip shook like an unhinged door. The summer
heat did little to revive him, and in September, when I came home from
my vacation, I found him just recovering from an attack of pneumonia.
That autumn he did not care to venture often into the night air, and now
and then I used to go and sit with him in his little room, to which I
had contributed the unheard-of luxuries of an easy-chair and a
gas-stove.
My engagements, however, made these visits
infrequent, and several weeks had elapsed without my seeing the
parocco when, one snowy November morning, I ran across him in the
railway-station. I was on my way to New York for the day and had just
time to wave a greeting to him as I jumped into the railway-carriage;
but a moment later, to my surprise, I saw him stiffly clambering into
the same train. I found him seated in the common car, with his umbrella
between his knees and a bundle done up in a red cotton handkerchief on
the seat at his side. The caution with which, at my approach, he
transferred this bundle to his arms caused me to glance at it in
surprise; and he answered my look by saying with a smile:
"They are flowers for the dead - the most
exquisite flowers - from the greenhouses of Mr. Meriton
-
si figuri!" And he waved a descriptive hand.
"One of my lads, Gianpietro, is employed by the gardener there, and
every year on this day he brings me a beautiful bunch of flowers
- for such a purpose it is no sin," he
added, with the charming Italian pliancy of judgment.
"And why are you travelling in this snowy weather, signor parocco?"
I asked, as he ended with a cough.
He fixed me gravely with his simple shallow eye. "Because it is the day
of the dead, my son," he said, "and I go to place these on the grave of
the noblest man that ever lived."
"You are going to New York?"
"To Brooklyn -"
I hesitated a moment, wishing to question
him, yet uncertain whether his replies were curtailed by the persistency
of his cough or by the desire to avoid interrogation.
"This is no weather to be travelling with such a cough," I said at
length.
He made a deprecating gesture.
"I have never missed the day - not once in
eighteen years. But for me he would have no one!" He folded his hands on
his umbrella and looked away from me to hide the trembling of his lip.
I resolved on a last attempt to storm his
confidence. "Your friend is buried in Calvary cemetery?"
He signed an assent.
"That is a long way for you to go alone,
signor parocco. The streets are sure to be slippery and there is an
icy wind blowing. Give me your flowers and let me send them to the
cemetery by a messenger. I give you my word they shall reach their
destination safely."
He turned a quiet look on me. "My son, you
are young," he said, "and you don't know how the dead need us." He drew
his breviary from his pocket and opened it with a smile. "Mi scusi?"
he murmured.
The business which had called me to town
obliged me to part from him as soon as the train entered the station,
and in my dash for the street I left his unwieldy figure laboring far
behind me through the crowd on the platform. Before we separated,
however, I had learned that he was returning to Dunstable by the four
o'clock train, and had resolved to despatch my business in time to
travel home with him. When I reached Wall Street I was received with the
news that the man I had appointed to meet was ill and detained in the
country. My business was "off" and I found myself with the rest of the
day at my disposal. I had no difficulty in deciding how to employ my
time. I was at an age when, in such contingencies, there is always a
feminine alternative; and even now I don't know how it was that, on my
way to a certain hospitable luncheon-table, I suddenly found myself in a
cab which was carrying me at full-speed to the Twenty-third Street
ferry. It was not till I had bought my ticket and seated myself in the
varnished tunnel of the ferry-boat that I was aware of having been
diverted from my purpose by an overmastering anxiety for Don Egidio. I
rapidly calculated that he had not more than an hour's advance on me,
and that, allowing for my greater agility and for the fact that I had a
cab at my call, I was likely to reach the cemetery in time to see him
under shelter before the gusts of sleet that were already sweeping
across the river had thickened to a snow-storm.
At the gates of the cemetery I began to take a less sanguine view of my
attempt. The commemorative anniversary had filled the silent avenues
with visitors, and I felt the futility of my quest as I tried to fix the
gatekeeper's attention on my delineation of a stout Italian priest with
a bad cough and a bunch of flowers tied up in a red cotton handkerchief.
The gate-keeper showed that delusive desire to oblige that is certain to
send its victims in the wrong direction; but I had the presence of mind
to go exactly contrary to his indication, and thanks to this precaution
I came, after half an hour's search, on the figure of my poor parocco,
kneeling on the wet ground in one of the humblest by-ways of the great
necropolis. The mound before which he knelt was strewn with the spoils
of Mr. Meriton's conservatories, and on the weather-worn tablet at its
head I read the inscription: IL
CONTE SIVIANO DA MILANO.
Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus.
So engrossed was Don Egidio that for some
moments I stood behind him unobserved; and when he rose and faced me,
grief had left so little room for any minor emotion that he looked at me
almost without surprise.
"Don Egidio," I said, "I have a carriage
waiting for you at the gate. You must come home with me."
He nodded quietly and I drew his hand through my arm.
He turned back to the grave. "One moment, my
son," he said. "It may be for the last time." He stood motionless, his
eyes on the heaped-up flowers which were already bruised and blackened
by the cold. "To leave him alone -
after sixty years! But God is everywhere
-" he murmured as I led him away.
On the journey home he did not care to talk, and my chief concern was to
keep him wrapped in my greatcoat and to see that his bed was made ready
as soon as I had restored him to his lodgings. The levatrice
brought a quilted coverlet from her own room and hovered over him as
gently as though he had been of the sex to require her services; while
Agostino, at my summons, appeared with a bowl of hot soup that was
heralded down the street by a reviving waft of garlic. To these
ministrations I left the
parocco, intending to call for news of him the next evening; but
an unexpected pressure of work kept me late at my desk, and the
following day some fresh obstacle delayed me.
On the third afternoon, as I was leaving the office, an agate-eyed
infant from the Point hailed me with a message from the doctor. The
parocco
was worse and had asked for me. I jumped into the nearest car and ten
minutes later was running up the doctor's greasy stairs.
To my dismay I found Don Egidio's room cold
and untenanted; but I was reassured a moment later by the appearance of
the levatrice, who announced that she had transferred the blessed
man to her own apartment, where he could have the sunlight and a good
bed to lie in. There in fact he lay, weak but smiling, in a setting
which contrasted oddly enough with his own monastic surroundings: a
cheerful grimy room, hung with anecdotic chromos, photographs of
lady-patients proudly presenting their offspring to the camera, and
innumerable Neapolitan santolini decked out with shrivelled
palm-leaves. The levatrice
whispered that the good man had the pleurisy, and that, as she phrased
it, he was nearing his last mile-stone. I saw that he was in fact in a
bad way, but his condition did not indicate any pressing danger, and I
had the presentiment that he would still, as the saying is, put up a
good fight. It was clear, however, that he knew what turn the conflict
must take, and the solemnity with which he welcomed me showed that my
summons was a part of that spiritual strategy with which the Catholic
opposes the surprise of death.
"My son," he said, when the
levatrice had left us, "I have a favor to ask you. You found me
yesterday bidding good-bye to my best friend." His cough interrupted
him. "I have never told you," he went on, "the name of the family in
which I was brought up. It was Siviano, and that was the grave of the
Count's eldest son, with whom I grew up as a brother. For eighteen years
he has lain in that strange ground -
in terra aliena
- and when I die, there will be no one to care
for his grave."
I saw what he waited for. "I will care for
it, signor parocco."
"I knew I should have your promise, my child;
and what you promise you keep. But my friend is a stranger to you - you
are young and at your age life is a mistress who kisses away sad
memories. Why should you remember the grave of a stranger? I cannot lay
such a claim on you. But I will tell you his story - and then I think
that neither joy nor grief will let you forget him; for when you rejoice
you will remember how he sorrowed; and when you sorrow the thought of
him will be like a friend's hand in yours."
II
You tell me (Don Egidio began) that you know our little lake; and if you
have seen it you will understand why it always used to remind me of the
"garden enclosed" of the Canticles.
Hortus inclusus; columba mea in foraminibus petrae: the words used
to come back to me whenever I returned from a day's journey across the
mountains, and looking down saw the blue lake far below, hidden in its
hills like a happy secret in a stern heart. We were never envious of the
glory of the great lakes. They are like the show pictures that some
nobleman hangs in his public gallery; but our Iseo is the treasure that
he hides in his inner chamber.
You tell me you saw it in summer, when it looks up like a saint's eye,
reflecting the whole of heaven. It was then too that I first saw it. My
future friend, the old Count, had found me at work on one of his
fruit-farms up the valley, and hearing that I was ill-treated by my
step-father - a drunken pedlar from the Val Mastellone, whom my poor
mother a year or two earlier had come across at the fair of Lovere - he
had taken me home with him to Iseo. I used to serve mass in our
hill-village of Cerveno, and the village children called me "the little
priest" because when my work was done I often crept back to the church
to get away from my step-father's blows and curses. "I will make a real
priest of him," the Count declared; and that afternoon, perched on the
box of his travelling-carriage, I was whirled away from the dark scenes
of my childhood into a world, where, as it seemed to me, every one was
as happy as an angel on a presepio.
I wonder if you remember the Count's villa? It lies on the shore of the
lake, facing the green knoll of Monte Isola, and overlooked by the
village of Siviano and by the old parish-church where I said mass for
fifteen happy years. The village hangs on a ledge of the mountain; but
the villa dips its foot in the lake, smiling at its reflection like a
bather lingering on the brink. What Paradise it seemed to me that day!
In our church up the valley there hung an old brown picture, with a
Saint Sabastian in the foreground; and behind him the most wonderful
palace, with terraced gardens adorned with statues and fountains, where
fine folk in resplendent dresses walked up and down without heeding the
blessed martyr's pangs. The Count's villa, with its terraces, its roses,
its marble steps descending to the lake, reminded me of that palace;
only instead of being inhabited by wicked people engrossed in their
selfish pleasures it was the home of the kindest friends that ever took
a poor lad by the hand.
The old Count was a widower when I first knew
him. He had been twice married, and his first wife had left him two
children, a son and a daughter. The eldest, Donna Marianna, was then a
girl of twenty, who kept her father's house and was a mother to the two
lads. She was not handsome or learned, and had no taste for the world;
but she was like the lavender-plant in a poor man's window - just a
little gray flower, but a sweetness that fills the whole house. Her
brother, Count Roberto, had been ailing from his birth, and was a
studious lad with a melancholy musing face such as you may see in some
of Titian's portraits of young men. He looked like an exiled prince
dressed in mourning. There was one child by the second marriage, Count
Andrea, a boy of my own age, handsome as a Saint George, but not as kind
as the others. No doubt, being younger, he was less able to understand
why an uncouth peasant lad should have been brought to his father's
table; and the others were so fearful of hurting my feelings that, but
for his teasing, I might never have mended my clumsy manners or learned
how to behave in the presence of my betters. Count Andrea was not
sparing in such lessons, and Count Roberto, in spite of his weak arms,
chastised his brother roundly when he thought the discipline had been
too severe; but for my part it seemed to me natural enough that such a
godlike being should lord it over a poor clodhopper like myself.
Well - I will not linger over the beginning
of my new life for my story has to do with its close. Only I should like
to make you understand what the change meant to me - an ignorant peasant
lad, coming from hard words and blows and a smoke-blackened hut in the
hills to that great house full of rare and beautiful things, and of
beings who seemed to me even more rare and beautiful. Do you wonder I
was ready to kiss the ground they trod, and would have given the last
drop of my blood to serve them?
In due course I was sent to the seminary at
Lodi; and on holidays I used to visit the family in Milan. Count Andrea
was growing up to be one of the handsomest young men imaginable, but a
trifle wild; and the old Count married him in haste to the daughter of a
Venetian noble, who brought as her dower a great estate in
Istria. The Countess Gemma, as this lady was called, was as
light as thistledown and had an eye like a baby's; but while she was
cooing for the moon her pretty white hands were always stealing toward
something within reach that she had not been meant to have. The old
Count was not alert enough to follow these manoeuvres; and the Countess
hid her designs under a torrent of guileless chatter, as pick-pockets
wear long sleeves to conceal their movements. Her only fault, he used to
say, was that one of her aunts had married an Austrian; and this event
having taken place before she was born he laughingly acquitted her of
any direct share in it. She confirmed his good opinion of her by giving
her husband two sons; and Roberto showing no inclination to marry, these
boys naturally came to be looked on as the heirs of the house.
Meanwhile I had finished my course of
studies, and the old Count, on my twenty-first birthday, had appointed
me priest of the parish of Siviano. It was the year of Count Andrea's
marriage and there were great festivities at the villa. Three years
later the old Count died, to the sorrow of his two eldest children.
Donna Marianna and Count Roberto closed their apartments in the palace
at Milan and withdrew for a year to Siviano. It was then that I first
began to know my friend. Before that I had loved him without
understanding him; now I learned of what metal he was made. His bookish
tastes inclined him to a secluded way of living; and his younger brother
perhaps fancied that he would not care to assume the charge of the
estate. But if Andrea thought this he was disappointed. Roberto
resolutely took up the tradition of his father's rule, and, as if
conscious of lacking the old Count's easy way with the peasants, made up
for it by a redoubled zeal for their welfare. I have seen him toil for
days to adjust some trifling difficulty that his father would have set
right with a ready word; like the sainted bishop who, when a beggar
asked him for a penny, cried out: "Alas, my brother, I have not a penny
in my purse; but here are two gold pieces, if they can be made to serve
you instead!" We had many conferences over the condition of his people,
and he often sent me up the valley to look into the needs of the
peasantry on the fruit-farms. No grievance was too trifling for him to
consider it, no abuse too deep-seated for him to root it out; and many
an hour that other men of his rank would have given to books or pleasure
was devoted to adjusting a quarrel about boundary-lines or to weighing
the merits of a complaint against the tax-collector. I often said that
he was as much his people's priest as I; and he smiled and answered that
every landowner was a king and that in old days the king was always a
priest. Donna Marianna was
urgent with him to marry, but he always declared that he had a family in
his tenantry, and that, as for a wife, she had never let him feel the
want of one. He had that musing temper which gives a man a name for
coldness; though in fact he may all the while be storing fuel for a
great conflagration. But to me he whispered another reason for not
marrying. A man, he said, does not take wife and rejoice while his
mother is on her death-bed; and Italy, his mother, lay dying, with the
foreign vultures waiting to tear her apart.
You are too young to know anything of those days, my son; and how can
any one understand them who did not live through them? Italy lay dying
indeed; but Lombardy was her heart, and the heart still beat, and sent
the faint blood creeping to her cold extremities. Her torturers, weary
of their work, had allowed her to fall into a painless stupor; but just
as she was sinking from sleep to death, heaven sent Radetsky to scourge
her back to consciousness; and at the first sting of his lash she sprang
maimed and bleeding to her feet.
Ah, those days, those days, my son! Italy - Italy - was the word on our
lips; but the thought in our hearts was just Austria. We clamored
for liberty, unity, the franchise; but under our breath we prayed only
to smite the white-coats. Remove the beam from our eye, we cried, and we
shall see our salvation clearly enough! We priests in the north were all
liberals and worked with the nobles and the men of letters. Gioberti was
our breviary and his Holiness the new Pope was soon to be the Tancred of
our crusade. But meanwhile, mind you, all this went on in silence,
underground as it were, while on the surface Lombardy still danced,
feasted, married, and took office under the Austrian. In the iron-mines
up our valley there used to be certain miners who stayed below ground
for months at a time; and, like one of these, Roberto remained buried in
his purpose, while life went its way overhead. Though I was not in his
confidence I knew well enough where his thoughts were, for he went among
us with the eye of a lover, the visionary look of one who hears a Voice.
We all heard that Voice, to be sure, mingling faintly with the other
noises of life; but to Roberto it was already as the roar of mighty
waters, drowning every other sound with its thunder.
On the surface, as I have said, things looked smooth enough. An Austrian
cardinal throned in Milan and an Austrian-hearted Pope ruled in Rome. In
Lombardy, Austria couched like a beast of prey, ready to spring at our
throats if we stirred or struggled. The Moderates, to whose party Count
Roberto belonged, talked of prudence, compromise, the education of the
masses; but if their words were a velvet sheath their thought was a
dagger. For many years, as you know, the Milanese had maintained an
outward show of friendliness with their rulers. The nobles had accepted
office under the vice-roy, and in the past there had been frequent
intermarriage between the two aristocracies. But now, one by one, the
great houses had closed their doors against official society. Though
some of the younger and more careless, those who must dance and dine at
any cost, still went to the palace and sat beside the enemy at the
opera, fashion was gradually taking sides against them, and those who
had once been laughed at as old fogeys were now applauded as patriots.
Among these, of course, was Count Roberto, who for several years had
refused to associate with the Austrians, and had silently resented his
easy-going brother's disregard of political distinctions. Andrea and
Gemma belonged to the moth tribe, who flock to the brightest light; and
Gemma's Istrian possessions, and her
family's connection with the Austrian nobility, gave them a pretext for
fluttering about the vice-regal candle. Roberto let them go their way,
but his own course was a tacit protest against their conduct. They were
always welcome at the palazzo Siviano; but he and Donna Marianna
withdrew from society in order to have an excuse for not showing
themselves at the Countess Gemma's entertainments. If Andrea and Gemma
were aware of his disapproval they were clever enough to ignore it; for
the rich elder brother who paid their debts and never meant to marry was
too important a person to be quarrelled with on political grounds. They
seemed to think that if he married it would be only to spite them; and
they were persuaded that their future depended on their giving him no
cause to take such reprisals. I shall never be more than a plain peasant
at heart and I have little natural skill in discerning hidden motives;
but the experience of the confessional gives every priest a certain
insight into the secret springs of action, and I often wondered that the
worldly wisdom of Andrea and Gemma did not help them to a clearer
reading of their brother's character. For my part I knew that, in
Roberto's heart, no great passion could spring from a mean motive; and I
had always thought that if he ever loved any woman as he loved Italy, it
must be from his country's hand that he received his bride. And so it
came about.
Have you ever noticed, on one of those still
autumn days before a storm, how here and there a yellow leaf will
suddenly detach itself from the bough and whirl through the air as
though some warning of the gale had reached it? So it was then in
Lombardy. All round was the silence of decay; but now and then a word, a
look, a trivial incident, fluttered ominously through the stillness. It
was in '45. Only a year earlier the glorious death of the Bandiera
brothers had sent a long shudder through Italy. In the Romagna, Renzi
and his comrades had tried to uphold by action the protest set forth in
the "Manifesto of Rimini"; and their failure had sowed the seed which
d'Azeglio and Cavour were to harvest. Everywhere the forces were
silently gathering; and nowhere was the hush more profound, the least
reverberation more audible, than in the streets of Milan.
It was Count Roberto's habit to attend early
mass in the Cathedral; and one morning, as he was standing in the aisle,
a young girl passed him with her father. Roberto knew the father, a
beggarly Milanese of the noble family of Intelvi, who had cut himself
off from his class by accepting an appointment in one of the government
offices. As the two went by he saw a group of Austrian officers looking
after the girl, and heard one of them say: "Such a choice morsel as that
is too good for slaves;" and another answer with a laugh: "Yes, it's a
dish for the master's table!"
The girl heard too. She was as white as a
wind-flower and he saw the words come out on her cheek like the red mark
from a blow. She whispered to her father, but he shook his head and drew
her away without so much as a glance at the Austrians. Roberto heard
mass and then hastened out and placed himself in the porch of the
Cathedral. A moment later the officers appeared, and they too stationed
themselves near the doorway. Presently the girl came out on her father's
arm. Her admirers stepped forward to greet Intelvi; and the cringing
wretch stood there exchanging compliments with them, while their
insolent stare devoured his daughter's beauty. She, poor thing, shook
like a leaf, and her eyes, in avoiding theirs, suddenly encountered
Roberto's. Her look was a wounded bird that flew to him for shelter. He
carried it away in his breast and its live warmth beat against his
heart. He thought that Italy had looked at him through those eyes; for
love is the wiliest of masqueraders and has a thousand disguises at his
command. Within a month
Faustina Intelvi was his wife. Donna Marianna and I rejoiced; for we
knew he had chosen her because he loved her, and she seemed to us almost
worthy of such a choice. As for Count Andrea and his wife, I leave you
to guess what ingredients were mingled in the kiss with which they
welcomed the bride. They were all smiles at Roberto's marriage, and had
only words of praise for his wife. Donna Marianna, who had sometimes
taxed me with suspecting their motives, rejoiced in this fresh proof of
their magnanimity; but for my part I could have wished to see them a
little less kind. All such twilight fears, however, vanished in the
flush of my friend's happiness. Over some natures love steals gradually,
as the morning light widens across a valley; but it had flashed on
Roberto like the leap of dawn to a snow-peak. He walked the world with
the wondering step of a blind man suddenly restored to sight; and once
he said to me with a laugh: "Love makes a Columbus of every one of us!"
And the Countess - ? The Countess, my son,
was eighteen, and her husband was forty. Count Roberto had the heart of
a poet, but he walked with a limp and his skin was sallow. Youth plucks
the fruit for its color rather than its flavor; and first love does not
serenade its mistress on a church-organ. In Italy girls are married as
land is sold; if two estates adjoin two lives are united. As for the
portionless girl, she is a knick-knack that goes to the highest bidder.
Faustina was handed over to her purchaser as if she had been a picture
for his gallery; and the transaction doubtless seemed as natural to her
as to her parents. She walked to the altar like an Iphigenia; but pallor
becomes a bride, and it looks well for a daughter to weep on leaving her
mother. Perhaps it would have been different if she had guessed that the
threshold of her new home was carpeted with love and its four corners
hung with tender thoughts of her; but her husband was a silent man, who
never called attention to his treasures.
The great palace in Milan was a gloomy house
for a girl to enter. Roberto and his sister lived in it as if it had
been a monastery, going nowhere and receiving only those who labored for
the Cause. To Faustina, accustomed to the easy Austrian society, the
Sunday evening receptions at the palazzo Siviano must have seemed as
dreary as a scientific congress. It pleased Roberto to regard her as a
victim of barbarian insolence, an embodiment of his country desecrated
by the desire of the enemy; but though, like any handsome penniless
girl, Faustina had now and then been exposed to a free look or a
familiar word, I doubt if she connected such incidents with the
political condition of Italy. She knew, of course, that in marrying
Siviano she was entering a house closed against the Austrian. One of
Siviano's first cares had been to pension his father-in-law, with the
stipulation that Intelvi should resign his appointment and give up all
relations with the government; and the old hypocrite, only too glad to
purchase idleness on such terms, embraced the liberal cause with a zeal
which left his daughter no excuse for half-heartedness. But he found it
less easy than he had expected to recover a footing among his own
people. In spite of his patriotic bluster the Milanese held aloof from
him; and being the kind of man who must always take his glass in company
he gradually drifted back to his old associates. It was impossible to
forbid Faustina to visit her parents; and in their house she breathed an
air that was at least tolerant of Austria.
But I must not let you think that the young Countess appeared ungrateful
or unhappy. She was silent and shy, and it needed a more enterprising
temper than Roberto's to break down the barrier between them. They
seemed to talk to one another through a convent-grating, rather than
across a hearth; but if Roberto had asked more of her than she could
give, outwardly she was a model wife. She chose me at once as her
confessor and I watched over the first steps of her new life. Never was
younger sister tenderer to her elder than she to Donna Marianna; never
was young wife more mindful of her religious duties, kinder to her
dependents, more charitable to the poor; yet to be with her was like
living in a room with shuttered windows. She was always the caged bird,
the transplanted flower: for all Roberto's care she never bloomed or
sang. Donna Marianna was the
first to speak of it. "The child needs more light and air," she said.
"Light? Air?" Roberto repeated. "Does she not go to mass every morning?
Does she not drive on the Corso every evening?"
Donna Marianna was not called clever, but her
heart was wiser than most women's heads.
"At our age, brother," said she, "the windows of the mind face north and
look out on a landscape full of lengthening shadows. Faustina needs
another outlook. She is as pale as a hyacinth grown in a cellar."
Roberto himself turned pale and I saw that
she had uttered his own thought.
"You want me to let her go to Gemma's!" he
exclaimed.
"Let her go wherever there is a little
careless laughter."
"Laughter - now!" he cried, with a gesture
toward the sombre line of portraits above his head.
"Let her laugh while she can, my brother."
That evening after dinner he called Faustina
to him.
"My child," he said, "go and put on your
jewels. Your sister Gemma gives a ball to-night and the carriage waits
to take you there. I am too much of a recluse to be at ease in such
scenes, but I have sent word to your father to go with you."
Andrea and Gemma welcomed their young sister-in-law with effusion, and
from that time she was often in their company. Gemma forbade any mention
of politics in her drawing-room, and it was natural that Faustina should
be glad to escape from the solemn conclaves of the palazzo Siviano to a
house where life went as gaily as in that villa above Florence where
Boccaccio's careless story-tellers took refuge from the plague. But
meanwhile the political distemper was rapidly spreading, and in spite of
Gemma's Austrian affiliations it was no longer possible for her to
receive the enemy openly. It was whispered that her door was still ajar
to her old friends; but the rumor may have risen from the fact that one
of the Austrian cavalry officers stationed at Milan was her own cousin,
the son of the aunt on whose misalliance the old Count had so often
bantered her. No one could blame the Countess Gemma for not turning her
own flesh and blood out of doors; and the social famine to which the
officers of the garrison were reduced made it natural that young
Welkenstern should press the claims of consanguinity.
All this must have reached Roberto's ears; but he made no sign and his
wife came and went as she pleased. When they returned the following year
to the old dusky villa at Siviano she was like the voice of a brook in a
twilight wood: one could not look at her without ransacking the spring
for new similes to paint her freshness. With Roberto it was different. I
found him older, more preoccupied and silent; but I guessed that his
preoccupations were political, for when his eye rested on his wife it
cleared like the lake when a cloud-shadow lifts from it.
Count Andrea and his wife occupied an
adjoining villa; and during the
villeggiatura the two households lived almost as one
family. Roberto, however, was often absent in Milan, called thither on
business of which the nature was not hard to guess. Sometimes he brought
back guests to the villa; and on these occasions Faustina and Donna
Marianna went to Count Andrea's for the day. I have said that I was not
in his confidence; but he knew my sympathies were with the liberals and
now and then he let fall a word of the work going on underground.
Meanwhile the new Pope had been elected, and from Piedmont to Calabria
we hailed in him the Banner that was to lead our hosts to war.
So time passed and we reached the last months of '47. The villa on Iseo
had been closed since the end of August. Roberto had no great liking for
his gloomy palace in Milan, and it had been his habit to spend nine
months of the year at Siviano; but he was now too much engrossed in his
work to remain away from Milan, and his wife and sister had joined him
there as soon as the midsummer heat was over. During the autumn he had
called me once or twice to the city to consult me on business connected
with his fruit-farms; and in the course of our talks he had sometimes
let fall a hint of graver matters. It was in July of that year that a
troop of Croats had marched into Ferrara, with muskets and cannon
loaded. The lighted matches of their cannon had fired the sleeping hate
of Austria, and the whole country now echoed the Lombard cry: "Out with
the barbarian!" All talk of adjustment, compromise, reorganization,
shrivelled on lips that the live coal of patriotism had touched. Italy
for the Italians, and then - monarchy, federation, republic, it mattered
not what!
The oppressor's grip had tightened on our
throats and the clear-sighted saw well enough that Metternich's policy
was to provoke a rebellion and then crush it under the Croat heel. But
it was too late to cry prudence in Lombardy. With the first days of the
new year the tobacco riots had drawn blood in Milan. Soon afterward the
Lions' Club was closed, and edicts were issued forbidding the singing of
Pio Nono's hymn, the wearing of white and blue, the collecting of
subscriptions for the victims of the riots. To each prohibition Milan
returned a fresh defiance. The ladies of the nobility put on mourning
for the rioters who had been shot down by the soldiery. Half the members
of the Guardia Nobile resigned and Count Borromeo sent back his Golden
Fleece to the Emperor. Fresh regiments were continually pouring into
Milan and it was no secret that Radetsky was strengthening the
fortifications. Late in January several leading liberals were arrested
and sent into exile, and two weeks later martial law was proclaimed in
Milan. At the first arrests several members of the liberal party had
hastily left Milan, and I was not surprised to hear, a few days later,
that orders had been given to reopen the villa at Siviano. The Count and
Countess arrived there early in February.
It was seven months since I had seen the Countess, and I was struck with
the change in her appearance.
She was paler than ever, and her step had lost its lightness. Yet she
did not seem to share her husband's political anxieties; one would have
said that she was hardly aware of them. She seemed wrapped in a veil of
lassitude, like Iseo on a still gray morning, when dawn is blood-red on
the mountains but a mist blurs its reflection in the lake. I felt as
though her soul were slipping away from me, and longed to win her back
to my care; but she made her ill-health a pretext for not coming to
confession, and for the present I could only wait and carry the thought
of her to the altar. She had not been long at Siviano before I
discovered that this drooping mood was only one phase of her humor. Now
and then she flung back the cowl of melancholy and laughed life in the
eye; but next moment she was in shadow again, and her muffled thoughts
had given us the slip. She was like the lake on one of those days when
the wind blows twenty ways and every promontory holds a gust in ambush.
Meanwhile there was a continual coming and going of messengers between
Siviano and the city. They came mostly at night, when the household
slept, and were away again with the last shadows; but the news they
brought stayed and widened, shining through every cranny of the old
house. The whole of Lombardy was up. From Pavia to Mantua, from Como to
Brescia, the streets ran blood like the arteries of one great body. At
Pavia and Padua the universities were closed. The frightened vice-roy
was preparing to withdraw from Milan to Verona, and Radetsky continued
to pour his men across the Alps, till a hundred thousand were massed
between the Piave and the Ticino. And now every eye was turned to Turin.
Ah, how we watched for the blue banner of Piedmont on the mountains!
Charles Albert was pledged to our cause; his whole people had armed to
rescue us, the streets echoed with avanti, Savoia! and yet Savoy
was silent and hung back. Each day was a life-time strained to the
cracking-point with hopes and disappointments. We reckoned the hours by
rumors, the very minutes by hearsay. Then suddenly - ah, it was worth
living through! - word came to us that Vienna was in revolt. The points
of the compass had shifted and our sun had risen in the north. I shall
never forget that day at the villa. Roberto sent for me early, and I
found him smiling and resolute, as becomes a soldier on the eve of
action. He had made all his preparations to leave for Milan and was
awaiting a summons from his party. The whole household felt that great
events impended, and Donna Marianna, awed and tearful, had pleaded with
her brother that they should all receive the sacrament together the next
morning. Roberto and his sister had been to confession the previous day,
but the Countess Faustina had again excused herself. I did not see her
while I was with the Count, but as I left the house she met me in the
laurel-walk. The morning was damp and cold, and she had drawn a black
scarf over her hair, and walked with a listless dragging step; but at my
approach she lifted her head quickly and signed to me to follow her into
one of the recesses of clipped laurel that bordered the path.
"Don Egidio," she said, "you have heard the
news?"
I assented.
"The Count goes to Milan to-morrow?"
"It seems probable, your excellency."
"There will be fighting - we are on the eve
of war, I mean?"
"We are in God's hands, your excellency."
"In God's hands!" she murmured. Her eyes
wandered and for a moment we stood silent; then she drew a purse from
her pocket. "I was forgetting," she exclaimed. "This is for that poor
girl you spoke to me about the other day - what was her name? The girl
who met the Austrian soldier at the fair at Peschiera - "
"Ah, Vannina," I said; "but she is dead, your excellency."
"Dead!" She turned white and the purse
dropped from her hand. I picked it up and held it out to her, but she
put back my hand. "That is for masses, then," she said; and with that
she moved away toward the house.
I walked on to the gate; but before I had
reached it I heard her step behind me.
"Don Egidio!" she called; and I turned back.
"You are coming to say mass in the chapel
to-morrow morning?"
"That is the Count's wish."
She wavered a moment. "I am not well enough
to walk up to the village this afternoon," she said at length. "Will you
come back later and hear my confession here?"
"Willingly, your excellency."
"Come at sunset then." She looked at me
gravely. "It is a long time since I have been to confession," she added.
"My child, the door of heaven is always unlatched."
She made no answer and I went my way.
I returned to the villa a little before
sunset, hoping for a few words with Roberto. I felt with Faustina that
we were on the eve of war, and the uncertainty of the outlook made me
treasure every moment of my friend's company. I knew he had been busy
all day, but hoped to find that his preparations were ended and that he
could spare me a half hour. I was not disappointed; for the servant who
met me asked me to follow him to the Count's apartment. Roberto was
sitting alone, with his back to the door, at a table spread with maps
and papers. He stood up and turned an ashen face on me.
"Roberto!" I cried, as if we had been boys together.
He signed to me to be seated.
"Egidio," he said suddenly, "my wife has sent
for you to confess her?"
"The Countess met me on my way home this
morning and expressed a wish to receive the sacrament to-morrow morning
with you and Donna Marianna, and I promised to return this afternoon to
hear her confession."
Roberto sat silent, staring before him as
though he hardly heard. At length he raised his head and began to speak.
"You have noticed lately that my wife has been ailing?" he asked.
"Every one must have seen that the Countess
is not in her usual health. She has seemed nervous, out of spirits - I
have fancied that she might be anxious about your excellency."
He leaned across the table and laid his wasted hand on mine. "Call me
Roberto," he said. There was
another pause before he went on. "Since I saw you this morning," he said
slowly, "something horrible has happened. After you left I sent for
Andrea and Gemma to tell them the news from Vienna and the probability
of my being summoned to Milan before night. You know as well as I that
we have reached a crisis. There will be fighting within twenty-four
hours, if I know my people; and war may follow sooner than we think. I
felt it my duty to leave my affairs in Andrea's hands, and to entrust my
wife to his care. Don't look startled," he added with a faint smile. "No
reasonable man goes on a journey without setting his house in order; and
if things take the turn I expect it may be some months before you see me
back at Siviano. - But it was not to hear this that I sent for you." He
pushed his chair aside and walked up and down the room with his short
limping step. "My God!" he broke out wildly, "how can I say it? - When
Andrea had heard me, I saw him exchange a glance with his wife, and she
said with that infernal sweet voice of hers, 'Yes, Andrea, it is our
duty.'
"'Your duty?' I asked. 'What is your duty?'
"Andrea wetted his lips with his tongue and
looked at her again; and her look was like a blade in his hand.
"'Your wife has a lover,' he said.
"She caught my arm as I flung myself on him.
He is ten times stronger than I, but you remember how I made him howl
for mercy in the old days when he used to bully you.
"'Let me go,' I said to his wife. 'He must live to unsay it.'
"Andrea began to whimper. 'Oh, my poor
brother, I would give my heart's blood to unsay it!'
"'The secret has been killing us,' she chimed in.
"'The secret? Whose secret? How dare you - ?'
"Gemma fell on her knees like a tragedy
actress. 'Strike me - kill me - it is I who am the offender! It was at
my house that she met him - '
"'Him?'
"'Franz Welkenstern - my cousin,' she wailed.
"I suppose I stood before them like a stunned
ox, for they repeated the name again and again, as if they were not sure
of my having heard it. - Not hear it!" he cried suddenly, dropping into
a chair and hiding his face in his hands. "Shall I ever on earth hear
anything else again?"
He sat a long time with his face hidden and I
waited. My head was like a great bronze bell with one thought for the
clapper.
After a while he went on in a low deliberate
voice, as though his words were balancing themselves on the brink of
madness. With strange composure he repeated each detail of his brother's
charges: the meetings in the Countess Gemma's drawing-room, the innocent
friendliness of the two young people, the talk of mysterious visits to a
villa outside the Porta Ticinese, the ever-widening circle of scandal
that had spread about their names. At first, Andrea said, he and his
wife had refused to listen to the reports which reached them. Then, when
the talk became too loud, they had sent for Welkenstern, remonstrated
with him, implored him to exchange into another regiment; but in vain.
The young officer indignantly denied the reports and declared that to
leave his post at such a moment would be desertion.
With a laborious accuracy Roberto went on, detailing one by one each
incident of the hateful story, till suddenly he cried out, springing
from his chair - "And now to leave her with this lie unburied!"
His cry was like the lifting of a grave-stone
from my breast. "You must not leave her!" I exclaimed.
He shook his head. "I am pledged."
"This is your first duty."
"It would be any other man's; not an
Italian's."
I was silent: in those days the argument
seemed unanswerable.
At length I said: "No harm can come to her
while you are away. Donna Marianna and I are here to watch over her. And
when you come back - "
He looked at me gravely. "If I come
back
-"
"Roberto!"
"We are men, Egidio; we both know what is
coming. Milan is up already; and there is a rumor that Charles Albert is
moving. This year the spring rains will be red in Italy."
"In your absence not a breath shall touch her!"
"And if I never come back to defend her? They
hate her as hell hates, Egidio! - They kept repeating, 'He is of her own
age and youth draws youth - .' She is in their way, Egidio!"
"Consider, my son. They do not love her,
perhaps; but why should they hate her at such cost? She has given you no
child."
"No child!" He paused. "But what if - ? She
has ailed lately!" he cried, and broke off to grapple with the stabbing
thought.
"Roberto! Roberto!" I adjured him.
He jumped up and gripped my arm.
"Egidio! You believe in her?"
"She's as pure as a lily on the altar!"
"Those eyes are wells of truth - and she has
been like a daughter to Marianna. - Egidio! do I look like an old man?"
"Quiet yourself, Roberto," I entreated.
"Quiet myself? With this sting in my blood? A
lover - and an Austrian lover! Oh, Italy, Italy, my bride!"
"I stake my life on her truth," I cried, "and who knows better than I?
Has her soul not lain before me like the bed of a clear stream?"
"And if what you saw there was only the
reflection of your faith in her?"
"My son, I am a priest, and the priest
penetrates to the soul as the angel passed through the walls of Peter's
prison. I see the truth in her heart as I see Christ in the host!"
"No, no, she is false!" he cried.
I sprang up terrified. "Roberto, be silent!"
He looked at me with a wild incredulous
smile. "Poor simple man of God!" he said.
"I would not exchange my simplicity for yours - the dupe of envy's first
malicious whisper!" "Envy - you
think that?"
"Is it questionable?"
"You would stake your life on it?"
"My life!"
"Your faith?"
"My faith!"
"Your vows as a priest?"
"My vows - " I stopped and stared at him. He
had risen and laid his hand on my shoulder.
"You see now what I would be at," he said quietly. "I must take your
place presently - " "My place -
?"
"When my wife comes down. You understand me."
"Ah, now you are quite mad!" I cried breaking
away from him.
"Am I?" he returned, maintaining his strange
composure. "Consider a moment. She has not confessed to you before since
our return from Milan - "
"Her ill-health - "
He cut me short with a gesture. "Yet to-day
she sends for you - "
"In order that she may receive the sacrament
with you on the eve of your first separation."
"If that is her only reason her first words will clear her. I must hear
those words, Egidio!" "You are
quite mad," I repeated.
"Strange," he said slowly. "You stake your
life on my wife's innocence, yet you refuse me the only means of
vindicating it!"
"I would give my life for any one of you -
but what you ask is not mine to give."
"The priest first - the man afterward?" he sneered.
"Long afterward!"
He measured me with a contemptuous eye. "We
laymen are ready to give the last shred of flesh from our bones, but you
priests intend to keep your cassocks whole."
"I tell you my cassock is not mine," I repeated.
"And, by God," he cried, "you are right; for
it's mine! Who put it on your back but my father? What kept it there but
my charity? Peasant! beggar! Hear his holiness pontificate!" "Yes," I
said, "I was a peasant and a beggar when your father found me; and if he
had left me one I might have been excused for putting my hand to any
ugly job that my betters required of me; but he made me a priest, and so
set me above all of you, and laid on me the charge of your souls as well
as mine."
He sat down shaken with dreadful tears. "Ah,"
he broke out, "would you have answered me thus when we were boys
together, and I stood between you and Andrea?"
"If God had given me the strength."
"You call it strength to make a woman's soul
your stepping-stone to heaven?"
"Her soul is in my care, not yours, my son. She is safe with me."
"She? But I? I go out to meet death, and
leave a worse death behind me!" He leaned over and clutched my arm. "It
is not for myself I plead but for her - for her, Egidio! Don't you see
to what a hell you condemn her if I don't come back? What chance has she
against that slow unsleeping hate? Their lies will fasten themselves to
her and suck out her life. You and Marianna are powerless against such
enemies."
"You leave her in God's hands, my son."
"Easily said - but, ah, priest, if you were a
man! What if their poison works in me and I go to battle thinking that
every Austrian bullet may be sent by her lover's hand? What if I die not
only to free Italy but to free my wife as well?"
I laid my hand on his shoulder. "My son, I answer for her. Leave your
faith in her in my hands and I will keep it whole."
He stared at me strangely. "And what if your
own fail you?"
"In her? Never. I call every saint to
witness!"
"And yet - and yet - ah, this is a blind," he
shouted; "you know all and perjure yourself to spare me!"
At that, my son, I felt a knife in my breast. I looked at him in anguish
and his gaze was a wall of metal. Mine seemed to slip away from it, like
a clawless thing struggling up the sheer side of a precipice.
"You know all," he repeated, "and you dare
not let me hear her!"
"I dare not betray my trust."
He waved the answer aside.
"Is this a time to quibble over church
discipline? If you believed in her you would save her at any cost!"
I said to myself, "Eternity can hold nothing worse than this for me - "
and clutched my resolve again like a cross to my bosom.
Just then there was a hand on the door and we
heard Donna Marianna.
"Faustina has sent to know if the signor
parocco is here."
"He is here. Bid her come down to the
chapel." Roberta spoke quietly, and closed the door on her so that she
should not see his face. We heard her patter away across the brick floor
of the salone.
Roberto turned to me. "Egidio!" he said; and
all at once I was no more than a straw on the torrent of his will.
The chapel adjoined the room in which we sat. He opened the door, and in
the twilight I saw the light glimmering before the Virgin's shrine and
the old carved confessional standing like a cowled watcher in its
corner. But I saw it all in a dream; for nothing in heaven or earth was
real to me but the iron grip on my shoulder.
"Quick!" he said and drove me forward. I heard him shoot back the bolt
of the outer door and a moment later I stood alone in the garden. The
sun had set and the cold spring dusk was falling. Lights shone here and
there in the long front of the villa; the statues glimmered gray among
the thickets. Through the window-pane of the chapel I caught the faint
red gleam of the Virgin's lamp; but I turned my back on it and walked
away.
* * * * *
All night I lay like a heretic on the fire.
Before dawn there came a call from the villa. The Count had received a
second summons from Milan and was to set out in an hour. I hurried down
the cold dewy path to the lake. All was new and hushed and strange as on
the day of resurrection; and in the dark twilight of the garden alleys
the statues stared at me like the shrouded dead.
In the salone, where the old Count's portrait hung, I found the
family assembled. Andrea and Gemma sat together, a little pinched, I
thought, but decent and self-contained, like mourners who expect to
inherit. Donna Marianna drooped near them, with something black over her
head and her face dim with weeping. Roberto received me calmly and then
turned to his sister. "Go fetch
my wife," he said.
While she was gone there was silence. We
could hear the cold drip of the garden-fountain and the patter of rats
in the wall. Andrea and his wife stared out of window and Roberto sat in
his father's carved seat at the head of the long table. Then the door
opened and Faustina entered.
When I saw her I stopped breathing. She
seemed no more than the shell of herself, a hollow thing that grief has
voided. Her eyes returned our images like polished agate, but conveyed
to her no sense of our presence. Marianna led her to a seat, and she
crossed her hands and nailed her dull gaze on Roberto. I looked from one
to another, and in that spectral light it seemed to me that we were all
souls come to judgment and naked to each other as to God. As to my own
wrongdoing, it weighed on me no more than dust. The only feeling I had
room for was fear - a fear that seemed to fill my throat and lungs and
bubble coldly over my drowning head.
Suddenly Roberto began to speak. His voice
was clear and steady, and I clutched at his words to drag myself above
the surface of my terror. He touched on the charge that had been made
against his wife - he did not say by whom - the foul rumor that had made
itself heard on the eve of their first parting. Duty, he said, had sent
him a double summons; to fight for his country and for his wife. He must
clear his wife's name before he was worthy to draw sword for Italy.
There was no time to tame the slander before throttling it; he had to
take the shortest way to its throat. At this point he looked at me and
my soul shook. Then he turned to Andrea and Gemma.
"When you came to me with this rumor," he said quietly, "you agreed to
consider the family honor satisfied if I could induce Don Egidio to let
me take his place and overhear my wife's confession, and if that
confession convinced me of her innocence. Was this the understanding?"
Andrea muttered something and Gemma tapped a
sullen foot.
"After you had left," Roberto continued, "I
laid the case before Don Egidio and threw myself on his mercy." He
looked at me fixedly. "So strong was his faith in my wife's innocence
that for her sake he agreed to violate the sanctity of the confessional.
I took his place."
Marianna sobbed and crossed herself and a
strange look flitted over Faustina's face.
There was a moment's pause; then Roberto, rising, walked across the room
to his wife and took her by the hand.
"Your seat is beside me, Countess Siviano," he said, and led her to the
empty chair by his own. Gemma
started to her feet, but her husband pulled her down again.
"Jesus! Mary!" We heard Donna Marianna moan.
Roberto raised his wife's hand to his lips.
"You forgive me," he said, "the means I took to defend you?" And turning
to Andrea he added slowly: "I declare my wife innocent and my honor
satisfied. You swear to stand by my decision?"
What Andrea stammered out, what hissing serpents of speech Gemma's
clinched teeth bit back, I never knew - for my eyes were on Faustina,
and her face was a wonder to behold.
She had let herself be led across the room like a blind woman, and had
listened without change of feature to her husband's first words; but as
he ceased her frozen gaze broke and her whole body seemed to melt
against his breast. He put his arm out, but she slipped to his feet and
Marianna hastened forward to raise her up. At that moment we heard the
stroke of oars across the quiet water and saw the Count's boat touch the
landing-steps. Four strong oarsmen from Monte Isola were to row him down
to Iseo, to take horse for Milan, and his servant, knapsack on shoulder,
knocked warningly at the terrace window.
"No time to lose, excellency!" he cried.
Roberto turned and gripped my hand. "Pray for
me," he said low; and with a brief gesture to the others ran down the
terrace to the boat.
Marianna was bathing Faustina with happy
tears.
"Look up, dear! Think how soon he will come
back! And there is the sunrise - see!"
Andrea and Gemma had slunk away like ghosts at cock-crow, and a red dawn
stood over Milan.
* * * * *
If that sun rose red it set scarlet. It was
the first of the Five Days in Milan - the Five Glorious Days, as they
are called. Roberto reached the city just before the gates closed. So
much we knew - little more. We heard of him in the Broletto (whence he
must have escaped when the Austrians blew in the door) and in the Casa
Vidiserti, with Casati, Cattaneo and the rest; but after the barricading
began we could trace him only as having been seen here and there in the
thick of the fighting, or tending the wounded under Bertani's orders.
His place, one would have said, was in the council-chamber, with the
soberer heads; but that was an hour when every man gave his blood where
it was most needed, and Cernuschi, Dandolo, Anfossi, della Porta fought
shoulder to shoulder with students, artisans and peasants. Certain it is
that he was seen on the fifth day; for among the volunteers who swarmed
after Manara in his assault on the Porta Tosa was a servant of palazzo
Siviano; and this fellow swore he had seen his master charge with Manara
in the last assault - had watched him, sword in hand, press close to the
gates, and then, as they swung open before the victorious dash of our
men, had seen him drop and disappear in the inrushing tide of peasants
that almost swept the little company off its feet. After that we heard
nothing. There was savage work in Milan in those days, and more than one
well-known figure lay lost among the heaps of dead hacked and
disfeatured by Croat blades.
At the villa, we waited breathless. News came
to us hour by hour: the very wind seemed to carry it, and it was swept
to us on the incessant rush of the rain. On the twenty-third Radetsky
had fled from Milan, to face Venice rising in his path. On the
twenty-fourth the first Piedmontese had crossed the Ticino, and Charles
Albert himself was in Pavia on the twenty-ninth. The bells of Milan had
carried the word from Turin to Naples, from Genoa to Ancona, and the
whole country was pouring like a flood-tide into Lombardy. Heroes sprang
up from the bloody soil as thick as wheat after rain, and every day
carried some new name to us; but never the one for which we prayed and
waited. Weeks passed. We heard of Pastrengo, Goito, Rivoli; of Radetsky
hemmed into the Quadrilateral, and our troops closing in on him from
Rome, Tuscany and Venetia. Months passed - and we heard of Custozza. We
saw Charles Albert's broken forces flung back from the Mincio to the
Oglio, from the Oglio to the Adda. We followed the dreadful retreat from
Milan, and saw our rescuers dispersed like dust before the wind. But all
the while no word came to us of Roberto.
These were dark days in Lombardy; and nowhere darker than in the old
villa on Iseo. In September Donna Marianna and the young Countess put on
black, and Count Andrea and his wife followed their example. In October
the Countess gave birth to a daughter. Count Andrea then took possession
of the palazzo Siviano, and the two women remained at the villa. I have
no heart to tell you of the days that followed. Donna Marianna wept and
prayed incessantly, and it was long before the baby could snatch a smile
from her. As for the Countess Faustina, she went among us like one of
the statues in the garden. The child had a wet-nurse from the village,
and it was small wonder there was no milk for it in that marble breast.
I spent much of my time at the villa, comforting Donna Marianna as best
I could; but sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when we three sat
in the dimly-lit
salone, with the old Count's portrait overhead, and I looked up and saw
the Countess Faustina in the tall carved seat beside her husband's empty
chair, my spine grew chill and I felt a cold wind in my hair.
The end of it was that in the spring I went
to see my bishop and laid my sin before him. He was a saintly and
merciful old man, and gave me a patient hearing.
"You believed the lady innocent?" he asked when I had ended.
"Monsignore, on my soul!"
"You thought to avert a great calamity from
the house to which you owed more than your life?"
"It was my only thought."
He laid his hand on my shoulder.
"Go home, my son. You shall learn my
decision."
Three months later I was ordered to resign my
living and go to America, where a priest was needed for the Italian
mission church in New York. I packed my possessions and set sail from
Genoa. I knew no more of America than any peasant up in the hills. I
fully expected to be speared by naked savages on landing; and for the
first few months after my arrival I wished at least once a day that such
a blessed fate had befallen me. But it is no part of my story to tell
you what I suffered in those early days. The Church had dealt with me
mercifully, as is her wont, and her punishment fell far below my
deserts.... I had been some
four years in New York, and no longer thought of looking back from the
plough, when one day word was brought me that an Italian professor lay
ill and had asked for a priest. There were many Italian refugees in New
York at that time, and the greater number, being well-educated men,
earned a living by teaching their language, which was then included
among the accomplishments of fashionable New York. The messenger led me
to a poor boarding-house and up to a small bare room on the top floor.
On the visiting-card nailed to the door I read the name "De Roberti,
Professor of Italian." Inside, a gray-haired haggard man tossed on the
narrow bed. He turned a glazed eye on me as I entered, and I recognized
Roberto Siviano. I steadied
myself against the door-post and stood staring at him without a word.
"What's the matter?" asked the doctor who was bending over the bed. I
stammered that the sick man was an old friend.
"He wouldn't know his oldest friend just
now," said the doctor. "The fever's on him; but it will go down toward
sunset."
I sat down at the head of the bed and took
Roberto's hand in mine.
"Is he going to die?" I asked.
"I don't believe so; but he wants nursing."
"I will nurse him."
The doctor nodded and went out. I sat in the
little room, with Roberto's burning hand in mine. Gradually his skin
cooled, the fingers grew quiet, and the flush faded from his sallow
cheek-bones. Toward dusk he looked up at me and smiled.
"Egidio," he said quietly.
I administered the sacrament, which he
received with the most fervent devotion; then he fell into a deep sleep.
During the weeks that followed I had no time
to ask myself the meaning of it all. My one business was to keep him
alive if I could. I fought the fever day and night, and at length it
yielded. For the most part he raved or lay unconscious; but now and then
he knew me for a moment, and whispered "Egidio" with a look of peace.
I had stolen many hours from my duties to nurse him; and as soon as the
danger was past I had to go back to my parish work. Then it was that I
began to ask myself what had brought him to America; but I dared not
face the answer. On the fourth
day I snatched a moment from my work and climbed to his room. I found
him sitting propped against his pillows, weak as a child but clear-eyed
and quiet. I ran forward, but his look stopped me.
"Signor parocco," he said, "the doctor
tells me that I owe my life to your nursing, and I have to thank you for
the kindness you have shown to a friendless stranger."
"A stranger?" I gasped.
He looked at me steadily. "I am not aware
that we have met before," he said.
For a moment I thought the fever was on him; but a second glance
convinced me that he was master of himself.
"Roberto!" I cried, trembling.
"You have the advantage of me," he said
civilly. "But my name is Roberti, not Roberto."
The floor swam under me and I had to lean against the wall.
"You are not Count Roberto Siviano of Milan?"
"I am Tommaso de Roberti, professor of
Italian, from Modena."
"And you have never seen me before?"
"Never that I know of."
"Were you never at Siviano, on the lake of
Iseo?" I faltered.
He said calmly: "I am unacquainted with that
part of Italy."
My heart grew cold and I was silent.
"You mistook me for a friend, I suppose?" he
added.
"Yes," I cried, "I mistook you for a friend;"
and with that I fell on my knees by his bed and cried like a child.
Suddenly I felt a touch on my shoulder.
"Egidio," said he in a broken voice, "look up."
I raised my eyes, and there was his old smile above me, and we clung to
each other without a word. Presently, however, he drew back, and put me
quietly aside. "Sit over there,
Egidio. My bones are like water and I am not good for much talking yet."
"Let us wait, Roberto. Sleep now
- we can talk tomorrow."
"No. What I have to say must be said at
once." He examined me thoughtfully. "You have a parish here in New
York?" I assented.
"And my work keeps me here. I have pupils. It
is too late to make a change."
"A change?"
He continued to look at me calmly. "It would
be difficult for me," he explained, "to find employment in a new place."
"But why should you leave here?"
"I shall have to," he returned deliberately,
"if you persist in recognizing in me your former friend Count Siviano."
"Roberto!"
He lifted his hand. "Egidio," he said, "I am
alone here, and without friends. The companionship, the sympathy of my
parish priest would be a consolation in this strange city; but it must
not be the companionship of the parocco of Siviano. You
understand?"
"Roberto," I cried, "it is too dreadful to
understand!"
"Be a man, Egidio," said he with a touch of
impatience. "The choice lies with you, and you must make it now. If you
are willing to ask no questions, to name no names, to make no allusions
to the past, let us live as friends together, in God's name! If not, as
soon as my legs can carry me I must be off again. The world is wide,
luckily - but why should we be parted?"
I was on my knees at his side in an instant.
"We must never be parted!" I cried. "Do as you will with me. Give me
your orders and I obey - have I not always obeyed you?"
I felt his hand close sharply on mine. "Egidio!" he admonished me.
"No -
no - I shall
remember. I shall say nothing
-"
"Think nothing?"
"Think nothing," I said with a last effort.
"God bless you!" he answered.
My son, for eight years I kept my word to
him. We met daily almost, we ate and walked and talked together, we
lived like David and Jonathan - but without so much as a glance at the
past. How he had escaped from Milan - how he had reached New York - I
never knew. We talked often of Italy's liberation
- as what Italians would not?
- but never touched on his share in the
work. Once only a word slipped from him; and that was when one day he
asked me how it was that I had been sent to America. The blood rushed to
my face, and before I could answer he had raised a silencing hand.
"I see," he said; "it was your penance
too."
During the first years he had plenty of work
to do, but he lived so frugally that I guessed he had some secret use
for his earnings. It was easy to conjecture what it was. All over the
world Italian exiles were toiling and saving to further the great cause.
He had political friends in New York, and sometimes he went to other
cities to attend meetings and make addresses. His zeal never slackened;
and but for me he would often have gone hungry that some shivering
patriot might dine. I was with him heart and soul, but I had the parish
on my shoulders, and perhaps my long experience of men had made me a
little less credulous than Christian charity requires; for I could have
sworn that some of the heroes who hung on him had never had a whiff of
Austrian blood, and would have fed out of the same trough with the
white-coats if there had been polenta enough to go round. Happily my
friend had no such doubts. He believed in the patriots as devoutly as in
the cause; and if some of his hard-earned dollars travelled no farther
than the nearest wine-cellar or cigar-shop, he never suspected the
course they took. His health
was never the same after the fever; and by and by he began to lose his
pupils, and the patriots cooled off as his pockets fell in. Toward the
end I took him to live in my shabby attic. He had grown weak and had a
troublesome cough, and he spent the greater part of his days indoors.
Cruel days they must have been to him, but he made no sign, and always
welcomed me with a cheerful word. When his pupils dropped off, and his
health made it difficult for him to pick up work outside, he set up a
letter-writer's sign, and used to earn a few pennies by serving as
amanuensis to my poor parishioners; but it went against him to take
their money, and half the time he did the work for nothing. I knew it
was hard for him to live on charity, as he called it, and I used to find
what jobs I could for him among my friends the negozianti, who
would send him letters to copy, accounts to make up and what not; but we
were all poor together, and the master had licked the platter before the
dog got it.
So lived that just man, my son; and so, after
eight years of exile, he died one day in my arms. God had let him live
long enough to see Solferino and Villa-franca; and was perhaps never
more merciful than in sparing him Monte Rotondo and Mentana. But these
are things of which it does not become me to speak. The new Italy does
not wear the face of our visions; but it is written that God shall know
His own, and it cannot be that He shall misread the hearts of those who
dreamed of fashioning her in His image.
As for my friend, he is at peace, I doubt
not; and his just life and holy death intercede for me, who sinned for
his sake alone.
-THE END-
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