In a winter city : A story of the day

By Ouida

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Title: In a winter city
        A story of the day

Author: Ouida


        
Release date: August 29, 2026 [eBook #79472]

Language: English

Original publication: Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1896

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79472

Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


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                             IN A WINTER CITY.

                            A STORY OF THE DAY.

                                BY “OUIDA,”
         AUTHOR OF “STRATHMORE,” “GRANVILLE DE VIGNE,” “UNDER TWO
                      FLAGS,” “IDALIA,” “PUCK,” ETC.

                              [Illustration]

                               PHILADELPHIA.
                         J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
                                   1896.




IN A WINTER CITY.




CHAPTER I.


Floralia was once a city of great fame. It stands upon an historical
river. It is adorned with all that the Arts can create of beauty, of
grace, and of majesty. Its chronicles blaze with heroical deeds and
with the achievements of genius. Great men have been bred within its
walls,—men so great that the world has never seen their like since.

Floralia, in her liberties, in her citizens, in her poets and painters
and sculptors, once upon a time had few rivals, perhaps, indeed, no
equals, upon earth.

By what strange irony of fate, by what singular cynical caprice of
accident, has this fairest of cities, with her time-honored towers lifted
to her radiant skies, become the universal hostelry of cosmopolitan
fashion and of fashionable idleness? Sad vicissitudes of fallen
fortunes!—to such base uses do the greatest come.

It is Belisarius turned croupier to a gaming-table; it is Cæsar selling
cigars and newspapers; it is Apelles drawing for the “Albums pour Rire;”
it is Pindar rhyming the couplets for “Fleur de Thé;” it is Praxiteles
designing costumes for a calico ball; it is Phidias forming the poses of
a ballet!

Perhaps the mighty ghosts of mediæval Floralia do walk, sadly and
ashamed, by midnight under the shadow of its exquisite piles of marble
and of stone. If they do, nobody sees them; the cigarette-smoke is too
thick.

As for the modern rulers of Floralia, they have risen elastic and elated
to the height of the situation, and have done their best and uttermost to
degrade their city into due accordance with her present circumstances,
and have destroyed as much as they dared of her noble picturesqueness and
ancient ways, and have tacked on to her venerable palaces and graceful
towers, stucco mansions and straight hideous streets, and staring walls
covered with advertisements, and barren boulevards studded with toy trees
that are cropped as soon as they presume to grow a leaf, and have striven
all they know to fit her for her fortunes, as her inn-keepers, when they
take an antique palace, hasten to fit up a smoking-room, and, making a
paradise of gas-jets and liqueurs, write over it, “Il Bar Americano.”

It is considered very clever to adapt oneself to one’s fortunes; and
if so, the rulers of Floralia are very clever indeed; only the stucco
and the straight streets and the frightful boulevards cost money, and
Floralia has no money, and a very heavy and terrible debt; and whether it
be really worth while to deface a most beautiful and artistic city, and
ruin your nobles and gentry, and grind down your artisans and peasants,
and make your whole province impoverished and ill-content, for the
mere sake of pleasing some strangers by the stucco and the hoardings
that their eyes are used to at home,—well, that perhaps may be an open
question.

The Lady Hilda Vorarlberg had written thus far when she got tired, left
off, and looked out of the window on to the mountain-born and poet-hymned
river of Floralia. She had an idea that she would write a novel; she was
always going to do things that she never did do.

After all, they were not her own ideas that she had written, but only
those of a Floralian, the Duca della Rocca, whom she had met the night
before. But then the ideas of everybody have been somebody else’s
beforehand,—Plato’s, or Bion’s, or Theophrastus’s, or your favorite
newspaper’s; and the Lady Hilda, although she had been but two days in
the Winter City, had already in her first drive shuddered at the stucco
and the hoardings, and shivered at the boulevards and the little shaven
trees. For she was a person of very refined and fastidious taste, and
did really know something about the arts, and such persons suffer very
acutely from what the peculiar mind of your modern municipalities calls,
in its innocence, “improvements.”

The Lady Hilda had been to a reception, too, the night before, and
had gone with the preconceived conviction that a certain illustrious
Sovereign had not been far wrong when she had called Floralia the Botany
Bay of modern society; but then the Lady Hilda was easily bored, and not
easily pleased, and liked very few things, almost none: she liked her
horses, she liked M. Worth, she liked bric-à-brac, she liked her brother,
Lord Clairvaux, and, when she came to think of it—well, that was really
all.

The Lady Hilda was a beautiful woman, and knew it; she was dressed
in the height of fashion,—_i.e._, like a mediæval saint out of a
picture; her velvet robe clung close to her, and her gold belt, with
its chains and pouch and fittings, would not have disgraced Cellini’s
own working; her hair was in a cloud in front and in a club behind; her
figure was perfect: M. Worth, who is accustomed to furnish figures as
well as clothes, had a great reverence for her; in her, Nature, of whom
generally speaking he is disposed to think very poorly, did not need his
assistance; he thought it extraordinary, but, as he could not improve her
in that respect, he had to be content with draping Perfection, which he
did to perfection of course.

Her face also was left to nature, in a very blamable degree for a woman
of fashion. Her friends argued to her that any woman, however fair a
skin she might have, must look washed out without enamel or rouge at
the least. But the Lady Hilda, conscious of her own delicate bloom, was
obdurate on the point.

“I would rather look washed out than caked over,” she would reply; which
was cruel, but conclusive. So she went into the world without painting,
and made them all look beside her as if they had come out of a comic
opera.

In everything else she was, however, as artificial as became her sex, her
station, and her century.

She was a very fortunate woman; at least society always said so. The
Clairvaux people were very terribly poor, though very noble and mighty.
She had been married at sixteen, immediately on her presentation, to
a great European capitalist of nondescript nationality, who had made
an enormous fortune upon the stock exchanges in ways that were never
inquired into, and this gentleman, whose wealth was as solid as it
sounded fabulous, had had the good taste to die in the first months of
their wedded life, leaving her fifty thousand a year, and bequeathing
the rest of his money to the Prince Imperial. Besides her large income,
she had the biggest jewels, the choicest horses, the handsomest house in
London, the prettiest hotel in Paris, etc., etc., etc.; and she could
very well afford to have a fresh toilette a day from her friend Worth if
she chose. Very often she did choose. “What a lucky creature!” said every
other woman; and so she was. But she would have been still more so had
she not been quite so much bored. Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that
always _will_ get in the golden slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure.

The Lady Hilda looked out of the window and found it raining heavily.
When the sky of Floralia does rain, it does it thoroughly, and gets the
disagreeable duty over, which is much more merciful to mankind than the
perpetual drizzle and dripping of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or Middlesex.
It was the rain that had made her almost inclined to think she would
write a novel; she was so tired of reading them.

She countermanded her carriage, had some more wood thrown on the fire,
and felt disposed to regret that she had decided to winter here. She
missed all her _bibelots_, and all the wonderful shades and graces of
color with which her own houses were made as rich yet as subdued in tone
as any old cloisonné enamel. She had the finest rooms, here, in a hotel
which had been the old palace of Murat; and she had sent for flowers to
fill every nook and corner of them, an order which Floralia will execute
for as many francs as any other city would ask in napoleons.

But there is always a nakedness and a gaudiness in the finest suites of
any hotel; and the Lady Hilda, though she had educated little else, had
so educated her eyes and her taste that a _criard_ bit of furniture hurt
her as the grating of a false quantity hurts a scholar. She knew the
value of grays and creams and lavenders and olive greens and pale sea
blues and dead gold and Oriental blendings. She had to seat herself now
in an arm-chair that was of a brightness and newness in magenta brocade
that made her close her eyelids involuntarily to avoid the horror of it,
as she took up some letters from female friends and wondered why they
wrote them, and took up a tale of Zola’s and threw it aside in disgust,
and began to think that she would go to Algeria, since her doctors had
agreed that her lungs would not bear the cold of Paris this winter.

Only there was no art in Algeria, and there was plenty in Floralia,
present and traditional, and, so far as a woman of fashion can demean
herself to think seriously of anything beyond dress and rivalry, she
had in a way studied art of all kind, languidly indeed and perhaps
superficially, but still with some true understanding of it; for,
although she had done her best, as became a _femme comme il faut_, to
stifle the intelligence she had been created with, she yet had moments
in which M. Worth did not seem Jehovah, and in which Society scarcely
appeared the Alpha and Omega of human existence, as of course they did to
her when she was in her right frame of mind.

“I shall go to Algeria or Rome,” she said to herself: it rained
pitilessly, hiding even the bridges on the opposite side of the river;
she had a dreadful magenta-colored chair, and the window-curtains were
scarlet; the letters were on thin foreign paper and crossed; the book
was unreadable; at luncheon they had given her horrible soup and a
vol-au-vent that for all flavor it possessed might have been made of
acorns, ship-biscuit, and shalots; and she had just heard that her cousin
the Countess de Caviare, whom she never approved of, and who always
borrowed money of her, was coming also to the Hôtel Murat. It was not
wonderful that she settled in her own mind to leave Floralia as soon as
she had come to it.

It was four o’clock.

She thought she would send round to the bric-à-brac dealers’ and tell
them to bring her what china and enamels and things they had in their
shops for her to look at; little that is worth having ever comes into the
market in these days, save when private collections are publicly sold;
she knew the Hôtel Drouot and Christie and Mansom’s too well not to know
that: still, it would be something to do.

Her hand was on the bell when one of her servants entered. He had a card
on a salver.

“Does Madame receive?” he asked, in some trepidation, for do what her
servants might they generally did wrong; when they obeyed her she had
almost invariably changed her mind before her command could be executed,
and when they did not obey her, then the Clairvaux blood, which was
crossed with French and Russian, and had been Norman to begin with, made
itself felt in her usually tranquil veins.

She glanced at the card. It might be a bric-à-brac dealer’s.

On it was written “Duca della Rocca.” She paused doubtfully some moments.

“It is raining very hard,” she thought; then gave a sign of assent.

Everybody wearied her after ten minutes; still, when it was raining so
hard——




CHAPTER II.


“They say,” the great assassin who slays as many thousands as ever
did plague or cholera, drink or warfare; “they say,” the thief of
reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward’s mask, to filch
good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; “they say,”
a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous
will-o’-the-wisp when you would seize and choke it; “they say,” mighty
Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not
been ever known to touch the Lady Hilda.

She seemed very passionless and cold; and no one ever whispered that she
was not what she seemed. Possibly she enjoyed so unusual an immunity,
first, because she was so very rich; secondly, because she had many male
relations; thirdly, because women, whilst they envied, were afraid of
her. Anyway, her name was altogether without reproach; the only defect
to be found in her in the estimate of many of her adorers.

Married without any wish of her own being consulted, and left so soon
afterwards mistress of herself and of very large wealth, she had remained
altogether indifferent and insensible to all forms of love. Other women
fell in love in all sorts of ways, feebly or forcibly, according to their
natures, but she never.

The passions she excited broke against her serene contempt, like surf
on a rocky shore. She was the despair of all the “tueurs des femmes” of
Europe.

“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” she said to her brother once, when she
had refused the hereditary Prince of Deutschland; “I can do exactly as
I like; I have everything I want; I can follow all my own whims; I am
perfectly happy; why ever should I alter all this? What could any man
ever offer me that would be better?”

Lord Clairvaux was obliged to grumble that he did not know what any man
could.

“Unless you were to care for the man,” he muttered, shamefacedly.

“Oh!—h!—h!” said the Lady Hilda, with the most prolonged delicate and
eloquent interjection of amazed scorn.

Lord Clairvaux felt that he had been as silly and rustic as if he were a
plowboy. He was an affectionate creature himself, in character very like
a Newfoundland dog, and had none of his sister’s talent and temperament;
he loved her dearly, but he was always a little afraid of her.

“Hilda don’t say much to you, but she just gives you a look, and don’t
you sink into your shoes!” he said once to a friend.

He stood six feet three without the shoes, to whose level her single
glance could so pathetically reduce him.

But, except before herself, Lord Clairvaux, in his shoes or out of them,
was the bravest and frankest gentleman that ever walked the earth; and
the universal recollection of him and of his unhesitating habit of
“setting things straight” probably kept so in awe the calumny-makers that
he produced the miracle of a woman who actually was blameless getting
the credit of being so. Usually snow is deemed black, and coal is called
swans’-down, with that refreshing habit of contrariety which alone saves
society from stagnation.

It never occurred to her what a tower of strength for her honor was that
good-looking, good-tempered, stupid, big brother of hers, who could not
spell a trisyllable were it ever so, and was only learned in racing-stock
and greyhound pedigrees; but she was fond of him in a cool and careless
way, as she might have been of a big dog, and was prodigal in gifts to
him of great winners and brood mares.

She never went to stay with him at Broomsden; she disliked his wife,
her sister-in-law, and she was always bored to death in English
country-houses, where the men were out shooting all day, and half asleep
all the evening. The county people, the salt of the earth in their
own eyes, were infinitesimal as ants in hers. She detested drives in
pony-carriages, humdrum chitchat, and afternoon tea in the library; she
did not care in the least who had bagged how many brace; the details of
fast runs with hounds were as horribly tiresome to her as the boys home
from Eton; and she would rather have gone a pilgrimage to Lourdes than
have descended to the ball, where all sorts of nondescripts had to be
asked, and the dresses positively haunted her like ghosts.

Five years before, at Broomsden, she had taken up her candlestick after
three nights of unutterable boredom between her sister-in-law and a
fat duchess, and had mentally vowed never to return there. The vow she
had kept, and she had always seen Clairvaux in Paris, in London, in
Baden,—anywhere rather than in the home of their childhood, towards which
she had no tenderness of sentiment, but merely recollections of the
fierce tyrannies of many German governesses.

She would often buy him a colt out of the Lagrange or Lafitte stables,
and always send half Boissier’s and Siraudin’s shops to his children at
Christmas-time. That done, she considered nothing more could be expected
of her; it was certainly not necessary that she should bore herself.

To spend money was an easy undemonstrative manner of acknowledging the
ties of nature, which pleased and suited her. Perhaps she would have been
capable of showing her affection in nobler and more self-sacrificing
ways; but then there was nothing in her circumstances to call for that
kind of thing; no trouble ever came nigh her; and the chariot of her life
rolled as smoothly as her own victoria _à huit ressorts_.

For the ten years of her womanhood the Lady Hilda had had the command of
immense wealth. Anything short of that seemed to her abject poverty. She
could theorize about making herself into Greuze or Gainsborough pictures
in serge or dimity; but, in fact, she could not imagine herself without
all the black sables and silver fox, the velvets and silks, the diamonds
and emeralds, the embroideries and laces, that made her a thing which
Titian would have worshiped.

She could not imagine herself for an instant without power of limitless
command, limitless caprice, ceaseless indulgence, boundless patronage,
and all the gratifications of whim and will which go with the possession
of a great fortune and the enjoyment of an entire irresponsibility.

She was bored and annoyed very often indeed because Pleasure is not as
inventive a god as he ought to be, and his catalogue is very soon run
through; but it never by any chance occurred to her that it might be her
money which bored her.

When, on a very dreary day early in November, Lady Hilda, known by repute
all over Europe as the proudest, handsomest, coldest woman in the world,
and famous as an _élégante_ in every fashionable city, arrived at the
Hôtel Murat, in the town of Floralia, and it was known that she had come
to establish herself there for the winter (unless, indeed, she changed
her mind, which was probable), the stir in the city was extraordinary.
She brought with her several servants, several carriage-horses, immense
jewel-cases, and a pug dog. She was the great arrival of the season.

There was a Grand Duchess of Dresden, indeed, who came at the same time,
but she brought no horses; she hired her _coupé_ from a livery-stable,
and her star, notwithstanding its royalty, paled in proportion. Besides,
the Grand Duchess was a very little, shabby, insignificant person,
who wore black stuff dresses, and a wig without any art in it. She was
music-mad, and Wagner was her prophet. The Club took no account of her.

There is a club in Floralia, nay, it is the Club,—all other clubs being
for purposes gymnastic, patriotic, theatric, or political, and out of
society altogether.

The Club is very fond of black-balling, and gives very odd reasons for
doing so, instead of the simple and true one, that it wants to keep
itself to itself. It has been known to object to one man because his hair
curled, and to another because he was the son of a king, and to another
because his boots were not made in Paris. Be its reasons, however, good,
bad, or indifferent, it pleases itself; by its fiat newly-arrived women
are exalted to the empyrean or perish in obscurity, and its members are
the cream of masculine Floralia, and spend all fine afternoons on the
steps and the pavement, blocking up the passage-way in the chief street,
and criticising all equipages and their occupants.

When the Lady Hilda’s victoria, with the two blacks, and the white and
black liveries, swept past the Club, there was a great stir in these
philosophers of the stones. Most knew her by sight very well; two or
three knew her personally, and these fortunate few, who had the privilege
to raise their hats as that carriage went by, rose immediately in the
esteem of their fellows.

“Je n’ai jamais rien connu de si épatante,” said the French Duc de St.
Louis, who belongs to a past generation, but is much more charming and
witty than anything to be found in the present one.

“Twelve hundred and fifty thousand francs a year,” murmured the Marchese
Sampierdareno, with a sigh. He was married himself.

“Here is your ‘affaire,’ Paolo,” said Don Carlo Maremma to a man next him.

The Duca della Rocca, to whom he spoke, stroked his moustache, and smiled
a little.

“She is a very beautiful person,” he answered; “I have seen her before at
the Tuileries and at Trouville, but I do not know her at all. I was never
presented.”

“That will arrange itself easily,” said the Duc de St. Louis, who was one
of those who had raised their hats; “Maremma is perfectly right; it is in
every way the very thing for you. Moi, je m’en charge.”

The Duca della Rocca shrugged his shoulders a very little, and lighted a
fresh cigar. But his face grew grave, and he looked thoughtfully after
the black horses and the white and black liveries.

At the English reception that night, which the Lady Hilda disdainfully
likened in her own mind to a penal settlement, M. de St. Louis, whom she
knew very well, begged to be permitted to present to her his friend the
Duca della Rocca.

She was dressed like a mediæval saint of a morning; at night she was a
mediæval princess.

She had feuille-morte velvet slashed with the palest of ambers; a
high fraise; sleeves of the Renaissance; pointed shoes, and a great
many jewels. Della Rocca thought she might have stepped down out of a
Giorgione canvas, and ventured to tell her so. He gave her the carte du
pays of the penal settlement around her, and talked to her more seriously
for some considerable time. Himself and the Duc de St. Louis were the
only people she deigned to take any notice of; and she went away in an
hour, or rather less, leaving a kind of flame from her many jewels behind
her, and a frozen sense of despair in the hearts of the women, who had
watched her, appalled yet fascinated.

“Mais quelle femme impossible!” said Della Rocca, as he went out into the
night air.

“Impossible! mais comment donc?” said the Duc de St. Louis, with vivacity
and some anger.

The Duc de St. Louis worshiped her, as every year of his life he
worshiped three hundred and sixty-five ladies.

“Impossible!” echoed Della Rocca, with a cigar in his mouth.

Nevertheless, the next day, when the rain was falling in such torrents
that no female creature was likely to be anywhere but before her fire,
he called at the Hôtel Murat, and inquired if Miladi were visible, and,
being admitted, as better than nothing, as she would have admitted the
bric-à-brac man, followed the servant up-stairs, and walked into an
atmosphere scented with some three hundred pots of tea-roses, lilies of
the valley, and hothouse heliotrope.

“Ah, ah! you have been to see her. Quite right,” said the Duc de St.
Louis, meeting him as he came down the steps of the hotel in the rain,
when it was half-past five by the clock. “I am going also so soon as I
have seen Salvareo at the Club about the theatricals; it will not take
me a moment. Get in my cab; you are going there too? How is Miladi? You
found her charming?”

“She was in a very bad humor,” replied Della Rocca, closing the cab door
on himself.

“The more interesting for you to put her in a good one.”

“Would either good or bad last ten minutes?—you know her: I do not, but I
should doubt it.”

The Duc arranged the fur collar of his coat.

“She is a woman, and rich; too rich, if one can say so. Of course she has
her caprices——”

Della Rocca shrugged his shoulders.

“She is very handsome. But she does not interest me.”

The Duc smiled, and glanced at him.

“Then you probably interested her. It is much better you should not be
interested. Men who are interested may blunder.”

“She is vain,—she is selfish,—she is arrogant,” said Della Rocca, with
great decision.

“Oh ho!—all that you find out already? You did not amuse her long?——”

“C’est une femme exagérée en tout,” pursued Della Rocca, disregarding.

“No! Exaggeration is vulgar,—is bad taste. Her taste is
excellent,—unexceptionable——”

“Exagérée en tout!” repeated Della Rocca, with much emphasis.
“Dress,—jewels,—habits,—temper—everything. She had three hundred pots of
flowers in her room!”

“Flower-pots, pooh!——that is English. It is very odd,” pursued the Duc,
pensively, “but they really do like the smell of flowers.”

“Only because they cost so much to rear in their fogs. If they were
common as with us, they would throw them out of the window as we do.”

“Nevertheless, send her three hundred pots more. Il faut commencer la
cour, mon cher.”

Della Rocca looked out into the rain.

“I have no inclination; I dislike a woman of the world.”

The Duc chuckled a little.

“Ah, ah! since when, caro mio?”

“There is no simplicity; there is no innocence; there is no sincerity—”

“Bah!” said the Duc, with much disdain; “I do not know where you have got
those new ideas, nor do I think they are your own at all. Have you fallen
in love with a ‘jeune Mees’ with apple-red cheeks and sweetmeats in her
pocket? Simplicity,—innocence,—sincerity. Very pretty. Our old friend of
a million vaudevilles, L’Ingenue. We all know her. What is she in real
truth?—A swaddled bundle of Ignorance. Cut the swaddling-band—ugh! and
Ignorance flies to Knowledge as Eve did, only Ignorance does not want to
know good and evil: the evil contents her: she stops short at that. Yes,
yes, L’Ingenue will marry you that she may read Zola and Belot; that she
may go to La Biche au Bois; that she may smoke cigars with young men;
that she may have her dresses cut half-way down her spine; that she may
romp like a half-drunk harlot in all the cotillons of the year! Whereas
your woman of the world, if well chosen——”

“Will have done all these things beforehand at some one else’s expense,
and will have tired of them,—or not have tired; of the display of spine
and of the cotillon she will certainly never have tired unless she be
fifty——”

“That is not precisely what I mean,” said the Duc, caressing his small
white moustache. “No; I said well chosen,—well chosen. What it can matter
to you whether your wife smokes with young men, or reads bad novels, or
romps till breakfast, I do not see myself. There is a natural destiny
for husbands. The unwise fret over it, the wise profit by it. But,
considering that you dislike these things in your own wife, however much
you like and admire them in the wives of other persons, I would still
say, avoid our friend of a million vaudevilles,—la petite Mees de seize
ans. Ignorance is not innocence; it is a great mistake to suppose that
it even secures it. Your Mees would seize Belot and Zola à la réveille
des noces——. Miladi, yonder, for instance, when they come to her from her
bookseller’s, throws them aside, unread——”

“There was a book of Zola’s on her table to-day——”

“I would bet ten thousand francs that she had not gone beyond the
title-page,” interrupted the Duc, with petulance. “TASTE, mon cher Della
Rocca, is the only sure guarantee in these matters. Women, believe me,
never have any principle. Principle is a backbone, and no woman—except
bodily—ever possesses any backbone. Their priests and their teachers
and their mothers fill them with doctrines and conventionalities,—all
mere things of word and wind. No woman has any settled principles; if
she have any vague ones, it is the uttermost she ever reaches, and those
can always be overturned by any man who has any influence over her. But
Taste is another matter altogether. A woman whose taste is excellent
is preserved from all eccentricities and most follies. You never see
a woman of good sense _afficher_ her improprieties or advertise her
liaisons as women of vulgarity do. Nay, if her taste be perfect, though
she have weaknesses, I doubt if she will ever have vices. Vice will seem
to her like a gaudy color, or too much gold braid, or very large plaids,
or buttons as big as saucers, or anything else such as vulgar women
like. Fastidiousness, at any rate, is very good _postiche_ for modesty:
it is always decent, it can never be coarse. Good taste, inherent and
ingrained, natural and cultivated, cannot alter. Principles—ouf!—they
go on and off like a slipper; but good taste is indestructible; it is a
compass that never errs. If your wife have it—well, it is possible she
may be false to you; she is human, she is feminine; but she will never
make you ridiculous, she will never compromise you, and she will not romp
in a cotillon till the morning sun shows the paint on her face washed
away in the rain of her perspiration. Virtue is, after all, as Mme. de
Montespan said, une chose tout purement géographique. It varies with the
hemisphere like the human skin and the human hair; what is vile in one
latitude is harmless in another. No philosophic person can put any trust
in a thing which merely depends upon climate; but Good Taste——”

The cab stopped at the Club, and the Duc in his disquisition.

“Va faire la cour,” he said, paternally, to his companion as they went
through the doors of their Cercle. “I can assure you, mon cher, that the
taste of Miladi is perfect.”

“In dress, perhaps,” assented Della Rocca.

“In everything. Va faire la cour.”

Paolo, Duca della Rocca, was a very handsome man, of the finest and the
most delicate type of beauty; he was very tall, and he carried himself
with stateliness and grace; his face was grave, pensive, and poetic; in
the largest assembly people who were strangers to him always looked at
him, and asked, “Who is that?”

He was the head of a family, very ancient and distinguished, but very
impoverished; in wars and civil war all their possessions had drifted
away from them piece by piece: hence he was a great noble on a slender
pittance. It had always been said to him, and of him, as a matter of
course, that he would mend his position by espousing a large fortune, and
he had been brought up to regard such a transaction in the light of a
painful but inevitable destiny.

But, although he was now thirty-eight years of age, he had never seen,
among the many young persons pointed out to him as possessing millions,
any one to whom he could prevail upon himself to sell his old name and
title.

The Great Republic inspires, as it is well known, a passion for social
and titular distinctions in its enterprising sons and daughters, which
is, to the original flunkeyism of the mother country, as a Gloire de
Dijon to a dog-rose, as a Reine Claude to a common blue plum. Nor are
the pretty virgins whom the Atlantic wafts across in any way afflicted
with delicacy or hesitation if they can but see their way to getting what
they want; and they strike the bargain, or their mothers do so for them,
with a cynical candor as to their object which would almost stagger the
manager of a Bureau de Mariage.

Many and various were the gold-laden damsels of the West who were
offered, or offered themselves, to him. But he could not induce himself;
his pride, or his taste, or his hereditary instincts, were too strong
for him to be able to ally himself with rag- and bone-merchants from New
York, or oil-strikers from Pennsylvania, or speculators from Wall Street.

No doubt it was very weak of him; a dozen men of the great old races of
Europe married thus every year; but Paolo della Rocca loved his name as
a soldier does his flag, and he could not brave the idea of possibly
transmitting to his children traits and taints of untraceable or ignoble
inherited influences.

Over and over again he allowed himself to be the subject of discussion
among those ladies whose especial pleasure it is to arrange this sort of
matters; but when from discussion it had been ready to pass into action,
he had always murmured to his match-making friend,—

“A little more time!—next year.”

“Bah! ce n’est qu’une affaire de notaire,” said his special protectress
in these matters, a still charming Russian ex-ambassadress, who
constantly wintered in Floralia, and who, having had him as a lover when
he was twenty and she was thirty, felt quite a maternal interest in him
still as to his marriage and prospects.

Della Rocca was too much a man of the world and of his country not to
be well aware that she spoke the truth; it was only an affair for the
notaries, like any other barter; still, he put it off; it would have
to be done one day, but there was no haste,—there would always be
heiresses willing and eager to become the Duchess della Rocca, Princess
of Palmarola, and Marchioness of Tavignano, as his roll of old titles ran.

And so year by year had gone by, and he vaguely imagined that he would
in time meet what he wanted without any drawbacks: a delusion common to
every one, and realized by no one.

Meanwhile, the life he led, if somewhat purposeless, was not
disagreeable; being an Italian, he could live like a gentleman, with
simplicity, and no effort to conceal his lack of riches, and did not
think his dignity imperiled because he did not get into debt for the sake
of display; he would dine frugally without thinking himself dishonored;
refuse to join in play without feeling degraded; and look the finest
gentleman in Europe without owing his tailor a bill.

For other matters he was somewhat _désœuvré_. He had fought, like most
other young men of that time, in the campaign of ’59, but the result
disappointed him; and he was at heart too honest and too disdainful
to find any place for himself in that struggle between cunning and
corruption of which the political life of our regenerated Italy is at
present composed. Besides, he was also too indolent. So for his amusement
he went to the world, and chiefly to the world of great ladies; and for
his duties made sufficient for himself out of the various interests of
the neglected old estates which he had inherited; for the rest he was a
man of the world; that he had a perfect manner, all society knew; whether
he had character as well, nobody cared; that he had a heart at all, was
only known to himself, his peasantry, and a few women.




CHAPTER III.


The next morning the sun shone brilliantly; the sky was blue; the wind
was a very gentle breeze from the sea; her breakfast chocolate was well
made; the tea-roses and the heliotrope almost hid the magenta furniture
and the gilded plaster consoles and the staring mirrors. They had sent
her in a new story of Octave Feuillet; M. de St. Louis had forwarded
her a new volume of charming verse by Sully Prudhomme, only sold on the
Boulevards two days before, with a note of such grace and wit that it
ought to have been addressed to Elysium for Mme. de Sévigné; the post
brought her only one letter, which announced that her brother, Lord
Clairvaux, would come thither to please her, after the Newmarket Spring
Meeting, or perhaps before, since he had to see “Major Fridolin” in Paris.

On the whole, the next morning Lady Hilda, looking out of the hotel
window, decided to stay in Floralia.

She ordered her carriage out early, and drove hither and thither to enjoy
tranquilly the innumerable treasures of all the arts in which the city of
Floralia is so rich.

A Monsignore whom she knew well, learned, without pedantry, and who
united the more vivacious accomplishments of the virtuoso to the polished
softness of the churchman, accompanied her. The Clairvaux people from
time immemorial had been good Catholics.

Lady Hilda for her part never troubled her head about those things,
but she thought unbelief was very bad form, and that to throw over your
family religion was an impertinence to your ancestors. Some things in the
ceremonials of her church grated on her æsthetic and artistic ideas, but
then these things she attributed to the general decadence of the whole
age in taste.

Her Monsignore went home to luncheon with her, and made himself as
agreeable as a courtly churchman always is to every one; and afterwards
she studied the Penal Settlement more closely by calling on those leaders
of it whose cards lay in a heap in her anteroom, and amused herself with
its mind and manners, its attributes and antecedents.

“After all, the only people in any country that one can trust oneself
to know are the natives of it,” she said to herself, as she went to the
weekly “day” of the infinitely charming Marchesa del Trasimene, _nata_
Da Bolsena, where she met Della Rocca and M. de St. Louis, as everybody
meets everybody else, morning, afternoon, and evening, fifty times in the
twenty-four hours in Floralia, the results being antipathy or sympathy in
a fatal degree.

In her gyrations she herself excited extreme attention and endless envy,
especially in the breasts of those unhappy outsiders whom she termed the
Penal Settlement.

There was something about her!—Worth, Pingat, and La Ferrière dressed the
Penal Settlement, or it said they did. Carlo Maremma always swore that
there was a little dress-maker who lived opposite his stable who could
have told sad truths about many of these Paris-born toilettes; but no
doubt Maremma was wrong, because men know nothing about these things,
and are not aware that a practiced eye can tell the sweep of Worth’s
scissors under the shoulder-blades as surely as a connoisseur recognizes
the hand of Boule or Vernis Martin on a cabinet or an _étui_. At any
rate, the Penal Settlement swore it was adorned by Worth, Pingat, and La
Ferrière in all the glories and eccentricities imaginable of confections,
_unies_ and _mélangées_, Directoire and Premier Empire, Juive and Louis
Quinze; and if talking about a theory could prove it, certainly they
proved that they bore all Paris on their persons.

But there was something about _her_—it was difficult to say what; perhaps
it was in the tip of her Pompadour boot, or perhaps it hid in the back
widths of her skirt, or perhaps it lurked in the black sable fur of her
dolman,—but a something that made them feel there was a gulf, never to be
passed, between them and this world-famed _élégante_.

Lady Hilda would have said her secret lay in her always being just a
quarter of an hour in advance of the fashion. She was always the first
person to be seen in what six weeks afterwards was the rage; and when the
rage came, then Lady Hilda had dropped the fashion. Hence she was the
perpetual despair of all her sex,—a distinction which she was quite human
enough to enjoy in a contemptuous sort of way; as contemptuous of herself
as of others; for she had a certain vague generosity and largeness of
mind which lifted her above mean and small emotions in general.

She had been steeped in the world, as people call that combination of
ennui, excitement, selfishness, fatigue, and glitter, which forms the
various delights of modern existence, till it had penetrated her through
and through as a petrifying stream does the supple bough put in it. But
there were little corners in her mind which the petrifaction had not
reached.

This morning—it was half-past five o’clock in a November afternoon, and
pitch dark, but of course it was morning still, as nobody had dined,
the advent of soup and sherry bringing the only meridian recognized in
society—the Lady Hilda refreshed with a cup of tea from the samovàr of
her friend the Princess Olga Schouvaloff, who came yearly to her palace
in the historical river-street of historical Floralia, and having been
assured by Princess Olga that if they kept quite among themselves and
never knew anybody else but the Floralian Russian and German nobility,
and steadfastly refused to allow anybody else to be presented to them,
Floralia was bearable,—nay, even really agreeable,—she got into her
coupé, and was driven through the gloom to her hotel.

Her head servant made her two announcements:—Madame de Caviare had
arrived that morning, and hoped to see her before dinner.

Lady Hilda’s brows frowned a little.

The Duca della Rocca had sent these flowers.

Lady Hilda’s eyes smiled a little.

They were only some cyclamens fresh from the country, in moss. She had
regretted to him the day before that those lovely simple wood flowers
could not be found in florists’ shops nor in flower-women’s baskets.

After all, she said to herself, it did not matter that Mila had come, she
was silly and not very proper, and a nuisance altogether; but Mila was
responsible for her own sins, and sometimes could be amusing. So the Lady
Hilda, in a good-humored and serene frame of mind, crossed the corridor
to the apartments her cousin had taken just opposite to her own.

“He is certainly very striking-looking,—like a Vandyke picture,” she
thought to herself, irrelevantly, as she tapped at her cousin’s door;
those cyclamens had pleased her; yet she had let thousands of the
loveliest and costliest bouquets wither in her anteroom every year of her
life, without deigning to ask or heed who were even the senders of them.

“Come in, if it’s you, dear,” said Madame Mila, ungrammatically and
vaguely, in answer to the tap.

The Countess de Caviare was an Englishwoman, and a cousin, one of the
great West country Trehillyons whom everybody knows, her mother having
been a Clairvaux. She had been grandly married in her first season to
a very high and mighty and almost imperial Russian, himself a most
good-humored and popular person, who killed all his horses with fast
driving, gambled very heavily, and never amused himself anywhere so well
as in the little low dancing-places round Paris.

Madame Mila, as her friends always called her, was as pretty a little
woman as could be imagined, who enameled herself to such perfection
that she had a face of fifteen, on the most fashionable and wonderfully
costumed of bodies; she was very fond of her cousin Hilda, because
she could borrow so much money of her, and she had come to Floralia
this winter because in Paris there was a rumor that she had cheated at
cards,—false, of course, but still odious.

If she had made a little pencil-mark on some of the aces, where was the
harm in that?

She almost always played with the same people, and they had won heaps of
money of her. Whilst those horrid creatures in the city and on the bourse
were allowed to “rig the market,” and nobody thought the worse of them
for spreading false news to send their shares up or down, why should not
one poor little woman try to help on Chance a little bit at play?

She was always in debt, though she admitted that her husband allowed her
liberally. She had eighty thousand francs a year by her settlements to
spend on herself, and he gave her another fifty thousand to do as she
pleased with: on the whole, about one-half what he allowed to Blanche
Souris, of the Château-Gaillard theatre.

She had had six children: three were living and three were dead; she
thought herself a good mother, because she gave her wet-nurses ever so
many silk gowns, and when she wanted the children for a fancy ball or a
drive, always saw that they were faultlessly dressed; and, besides, she
always took them to Trouville.

She had never had any grief in her life, except the loss of the Second
Empire; and even that she got over when she found that flying the Red
Cross flag had saved her hotel, without so much as a teacup being broken
in it, that MM. Worth and Offenbach were safe from all bullets, and that
society under the Septennate promised to be every bit as _leste_ as under
the Empire.

In a word, Madame Mila was a type of the women of her time.

The women who go semi-nude in an age which has begun to discover that the
nude in sculpture is very immoral; who discuss “Tue-la” in a generation
which decrees Molière to be coarse, and Beaumont and Fletcher indecent;
who have the Journal pour Rire on their tables in a day when no one who
respects themselves would name the Harlot’s Progress; who read Gautier
and Baudelaire in an era which finds “Don Juan” gross, and Shakspeare far
too plain; who strain all their energies to rival Mlles. Rose Thé and
La Petite Boulotte in everything; who go shrimping or oyster-hunting on
fashionable sea-shores, with their legs bare to the knee; who go to the
mountains with confections, high heels, and gold-tipped canes, shriek
over their gambling as the dawn reddens over the Alps, and know no more
of the glories of earth and sky, of sunrise and sunset, than do the
porcelain pots that hold their paint, or the silver dressing-box that
carries their hair-dye.

Women who are in convulsions one day and on the top of a drag the next;
who are in hysterics for their lovers at noonday and in ecstasies over
baccarat at midnight; who laugh in little nooks together over each
other’s immoralities, and have a moral code so elastic that it will
pardon anything except innocence; who gossip over each other’s dresses,
and each other’s passions, in the selfsame self-satisfied chirp of
contentment, and who never resent anything on earth, except any eccentric
suggestion that life could be anything except a perpetual fête à la
Watteau in a perpetual blaze of lime-light.

Pain?—Are there not chloral and a flattering doctor? Sorrow?—Are there
not a course at the Baths, play at Monte Carlo, and new cases from Worth?
Shame?—Is it not a famine-fever which never comes near a well-laden
table? Old Age?—Are there not white and red paint, and heads of dead
hair, and even false bosoms? Death?—Well, no doubt there is death, but
they do not realize it; they hardly believe in it, they think about it so
little.

There is something unknown somewhere to fall on them some day that they
dread vaguely, for they are terrible cowards. But they worry as little
about it as possible. They give the millionth part of what they possess
away in its name to whatever church they belong to, and they think they
have arranged quite comfortably for all possible contingencies hereafter.

If it makes things safe, they will head bazaars for the poor, or wear
black in Holy Week, turn lottery-wheels for charity, or put on fancy
dresses in the name of benevolence, or do any little amiable trifle of
that sort. But as for changing their lives,—_pas si bête!_

A bird in the hand they hold worth two in the bush; and though your birds
may be winged on strong desire, and your bush the burning portent of
Moses, they will have none of them.

These women are not at all bad; oh, no! they are like sheep, that is all.
If it were fashionable to be virtuous, very likely they would be so. If
it were _chic_ to be devout, no doubt they would pass their life on their
knees. But, as it is, they know that a flavor of vice is as necessary to
their reputation as great ladies, as sorrel-leaves to soupe à la bonne
femme. They affect a license if they take it not.

They are like the barber, who said, with much pride, to Voltaire, “Je ne
suis qu’un pauvre diable de perruquier, mais je ne crois pas en Dieu plus
que les autres.”

They may be worth very little, but they are desperately afraid that you
should make such a mistake as to think them worth anything at all. You
are not likely, if you know them. Still, they are apprehensive.

Though one were to arise from the dead to preach to them, they would only
make of him a nine days’ wonder, and then laugh a little, and yawn a
little, and go on in their own paths.

Out of the eater came forth sweetness, and from evil there may be
begotten good; but out of nullity there can only come nullity. They have
wadded their ears, and though Jeremiah wailed of desolation, or Isaiah
thundered the wrath of heaven, they would not hear,—they would go on
looking at each other’s dresses.

What could Paul himself say that would change them?

You cannot make saw-dust into marble; you cannot make sea-sand into gold.
“Let us alone,” is all they ask; and it is all that you could do, though
the force and flame of Horeb were in you.

Mila, Countess de Caviare, having arrived early in the morning and
remained invisible all day, had awakened at five to a cup of tea, an
exquisite dressing-gown, and her choicest enamel; she now gave many
bird-like kisses to her cousin, heaped innumerable endearments upon her,
and, hearing there was nothing to do, sent out for a box at the French
Theatre.

“It is wretched acting,” said the Lady Hilda; “I went the other night,
but I did not stay half an hour.”

“That of course, ma chère,” said Madame Mila; “but we shall be sure to
see people we know,—heaps of people.”

“Such as they are,” said the Lady Hilda.

“At any rate, it is better than spending an evening alone. I never spent
an evening alone in my life,” said Mme. de Caviare, who could no more
live without a crowd about her than she could sleep without chlorodyne,
or put a petticoat on without two or three maids’ assistance.

The French company in Floralia is usually about the average of the weakly
patchwork troops of poor actors that pass on third-rate little stages in
the French departments; but Floralia, feminine and fashionable, flocks
to the French company because it can rely on something _tant soit peu
hazardé_, and is quite sure not to be bored with decency, and if by any
oversight or bad taste the management should put any serious sort of
piece on the stage, it can always turn its back to the stage and whisper
to its lovers or chatter shrilly to its allies.

They went into their box as the second act ended of “Mme. de
Scabreuse,”—a play of the period, written by a celebrated author, in
which the lady married her nephew, and finding out that he was enamored
of her daughter, the offspring of a first marriage, bought poison for
them both, and then, suddenly changing her mind, with magnificent
magnanimity drank it herself, and blessed the lovers as she died in great
agonies.

It had been brought out in Paris with enormous success, and as Lady Hilda
and the countess had both seen it half a dozen times they could take no
interest in it.

“You _would_ come!” said the former, raising her eyebrows and seating
herself so as to see nothing whatever of the stage and as little as
possible of the house.

“Of course,” replied Madame Mila, whose lorgnon was ranging hither and
thither, like a general’s spy-glass before a battle. “There was nothing
else to do; at least you said there was nothing. Look! some of those
women have actually got the œuf de Pâques corsage—good heaven!—those went
out last year, utterly, utterly! Ah, there is Lucia San Luca,—what big
emeralds!—and there is Maria Castelfidardo: how old she is looking! That
is Lady Featherleigh: you remember that horrid scandal?—Yes, I hear they
do visit her here. How handsome Luisa Ottoseccoli looks! powder becomes
her so; her son is a pretty boy,—oh, you never stoop to boys; you are
wrong; nothing amuses one like a boy; _how_ they believe in one! There
is that Canadian woman who tried to get into notice in Paris two seasons
ago,—you remember?—they make her quite crême in this place,—the idea! She
is dressed very well: I dare say if she were always dumb she might pass.
She never would have been heard of even here, only Altavante pushed her
right and left, bribed the best people to her parties, and induced all
his other _tendresses_ to send her cards. In love! of course not! Who is
in love with a face like a Mohican squaw’s and a squeak like a goose’s?
But they are immensely rich; at least they have mountains of ready money;
he must have suffered dreadfully before he made her dress well. Teach her
grammar, in any language, he never will. There is the old Duchesse—why,
she was a centenarian when we were babies—but they say she plays every
atom as keenly as ever; nobody can beat her for lace, either—look at that
Spanish point. There are a few decent people here this winter; not many,
though; I think it would have been wiser to have stopped at Nice. Ah, mon
cher, comment ça va?—tell me, Maurice, who is that woman in black with
good diamonds, there, with Sanpierdareno and San Marco?”

“Maurice,” pressing her pretty hand, sank down on to the hard bench
behind her arm-chair and insinuated gracefully that the woman in black
with good diamonds was not “d’un vertu assez fort” to be noticed by
or described to such ladies as Mila, Countess de Caviare, but, since
identification of her was insisted on, proceeded to confess that she was
no less a person than the wild Duke of Stirling’s Gloria.

“Ah! is _that_ Gloria?” said Madame, with the keenest interest, bringing
her lorgnon to bear instantly. “How curious! I never chanced to see her
before. How quiet she looks, and how plainly she is dressed!”

“I am afraid we have left Gloria and her class no other way of being
singular!” said the Lady Hilda, who had muttered her welcome somewhat
coldly to Maurice.

Maurice, Vicomte des Gommeux, was a young Parisian, famous for leading
cotillons and driving piebalds; he followed Mme. de Caviare with the
regularity of her afternoon shadow, was as much an institution with her
as her anodynes, and much more useful than her courier. To avoid all
appearances that might set a wicked world talking, he generally arrived
in a city about twenty-four hours after her, and, as she was a woman of
good breeding who insisted on _les mœurs_, always went to another hotel.
He had held his present post actually so long as three years, and there
were as yet no signs of his being dismissed and replaced, for he was very
devoted, very obedient, very weak, saw nothing that he was intended not
to see, and was very adroit at rolling cigarettes.

“Il est si bon enfant!” said the Count de Caviare to everybody; he really
was grateful to the young man, some of whose predecessors had much
disturbed his wife’s temper and his own personal peace.

“Bonsoir, mesdames,” said the Duc de St. Louis, entering the box.
“Comtesse, charmé de vous voir—Miladi, à vos pieds. What a wretched
creature that is playing Julie de Scabreuse! I blush for my country.
When I was a young man, the smallest theatre in France would not have
endured that woman. There was a public then with proper feeling for the
histrionic as for every other art; a bad gesture or a false intonation
was hissed by every audience, were that audience only composed of workmen
and work-girls; but now——”

“May one enter, mesdames?” asked his friend, Della Rocca.

“One may,—if you will only shut the door. Thanks for the cyclamens,” said
the Lady Hilda, with a little of the weariness going off her delicate,
proud face.

Della Rocca took the seat behind her, as the slave Maurice surrendered
his to M. de St. Louis.

“Happy flowers! I found them in my own woods this morning,” he said, as
he took his seat. “You do not seem much amused, madame.”

“Amused! The play is odious. Even poor Desclée’s genius could only give
it a horrible fascination.”

“It has the worst fault of all, it is unnatural.”

“Yes; it is very curious, but the French will have so much vice in the
drama, and the English must have so much virtue, that a natural or
possible play is an impossibility now upon either stage.”

“You looked more interested in the majolica this morning——”

“How! did you see me?”

“I was passing through the tower of the Podestà on business. Is it not
wonderful our old pottery! It is intensely to be regretted that Ginori
and Carocci imitate it so closely; it vulgarizes a thing whose chief
beauty after all is association and age.”

“Yes; what charm there is in a marriage plate of Maestro Giorgio’s, or
a sweetmeat-dish of your Orazio Fontana’s! But there is very scanty
pleasure in reproductions of them, however clever these may be, such as
Pietro Gay sends out to Paris and Vienna Exhibitions.”

“You mean, there can be no mind in an imitation?”

“Of course; I would rather have the crudest original thing than the
mere galvanism of the corpse of a dead genius. I would give a thousand
paintings by Froment, Damousse, or any of the finest living artists of
Sèvres, for one piece by old Van der Meer of Delft; but I would prefer
a painting on Sèvres done yesterday by Froment or Damousse, or even any
much less famous worker, provided only it had originality in it, to the
best reproduction of a Van der Meer that modern manufacturers could
produce.”

“I think you are right; but I fear our old pottery-painters were not
very original. They copied from the pictures and engravings of Mantegna,
Raffaelle, Marcantonio, Marco di Ravenna, Beatricius, and a score of
others.”

“The application was original, and the sentiment they brought to it.
Those old artists put so much heart into their work.”

“Because when they painted a _stemma_ on the glaze they had still feudal
faith in nobility, and when they painted a Madonna or Ecce Homo they
had still child-like belief in divinity. What does the pottery-painter
of to-day care for the coat of arms or the religious subject he may be
commissioned to execute for a dinner-service or a chapel? It may be
admirable painting,—if you give a very high price,—but it will still be
only manufacture.”

“Then what pleasant lives those pottery-painters of the early days must
have led! They were never long stationary. They wandered about decorating
at their fancy, now here and now there,—now a vase for a pharmacy, and
now a stove for a king. You find German names on Italian ware, and
Italian names on Flemish grès; the Nuremberger would work in Venice, the
Dutchman would work in Rouen.”

“Sometimes, however, they were accused of sorcery; the great potter,
Hans Kraut, you remember, was feared by his townsmen as possessed by the
devil, and was buried ignominiously outside the gates, in his nook of the
Black Forest. But on the whole they were happy, no doubt,—men of simple
habits and of worthy lives.”

“You care for art yourself, M. Della Rocca?”

There came a gleam of interest in her handsome, languid hazel eyes, as
she turned them upon him.

“Every Italian does,” he answered her. “I do not think we are ever,
or I think, if ever, very seldom, connoisseurs in the way that your
Englishman and Frenchman is so. We are never very learned as to styles
and dates; we cannot boast the huckster’s eye of the Northern bric-à-brac
hunter: it is quite another thing with us; we love art as children their
nurses’ tales and cradle-songs; it is a familiar affection with us, and
affection is never very analytical; the Robbia over the chapel-door,
the apostle-pot that the men in the stables drink out of, the Sodoma or
the Beato Angelico that hangs before our eyes daily as we dine, the old
bronze _secchia_ that we wash our hands in as boys in the loggia,—these
are all so homely and dear to us that we grow up with a love for them
all as natural as our love for our mothers. You will say the children
of all rich people see beautiful and ancient things from their birth;
so they do, but not _as_ we see them: here they are too often degraded
to the basest household uses, and made no more account of than the dust
which gathers on them; but that very neglect of them makes them the more
kindred to us. Art elsewhere is the guest of the salon,—with us she is
the playmate of the infant and the serving-maid of the peasant: the mules
may drink from an Etruscan sarcophagus, and the pigeons be fed from a
patina of the twelfth century.”

Lady Hilda listened with the look of awakened interest still in her large
eyes; he spoke in his own tongue, and with feeling and grace: it was new
to her to find a man with whom art was an emotion instead of an opinion.

The art world she had met with was one that was very positive, very
eclectic, very hypercritical, very highly cultured; it had many theories
and elegant phrases; it laid down endless doctrines, and found pleasure
in endless disputations. Whenever she had tired of the world of fashion,
this was the world she had turned to; it had imbued her with knowledge of
art, and immeasurable contempt for those to whom art was a dead letter;
but art had remained with her rather an intellectual dissipation than a
tenderness of sentiment.

“As you care for these things, madame,” continued Della Rocca, with
hesitation, “might I one day hope that you would honor my poor villa?
It has little else left in it, but there are still a few rare pieces of
Gubbio and Urbino and Faenza, and I have a Calvary which, if not by Lucca
himself, is certainly by Andrea della Robbia.”

“I shall be glad to see them. Your villa is near?”

“About ten miles’ distance, up in the hills. It was once a great
stronghold as well as palace. Now it can boast no interest save such as
may go with fallen fortunes. For more than a century we have been too
poor to be able to do any more than keep wind and water out of it; and it
had been cleared before my time of almost everything of value. Happily,
however, the chestnut woods outside it have not been touched. They shroud
its nakedness.”

“Your villa, Della Rocca?” cried Madame de Caviare, who had known him for
several years. “I have never seen it; we will drive out there some day
when the cold winds are gone——”

“Vous me comblez de bontés,” he answered, with a low bow. “Alas, madame,
there is very little that will repay you: it is hardly more than a ruin.
But if you and Miladi will indeed honor it——”

“It is a very fine place still,” said the Duc de St. Louis, a little
impatiently. “It has suffered in sieges, and is by so much the more
interesting. For myself, I endure very much pain from having a whole
house, and one built no later than 1730. My great-grandfather pulled down
the noble old castle, built at the same time as Château-Gaillard,—imagine
the barbarism!—and employed the ponderous _rocaille_ of Oppenord to
replace it. It is very curious, but loss of taste in the nobles has
always been followed by a revolution of the mob. The _décadence_ always
ushers in the democracy.”

“We may well be threatened, then, in this day with universal equality!”
said the Lady Hilda, hiding a very small yawn behind her fan.

“Nay, madame,” said Della Rocca. “In this day the nobles do not even do
so much as to lead a wrong taste; they accept and adopt every form of it,
as imposed on them by their tailors, their architects, their clubs, and
their municipalities, as _rocaille_ was imposed by the cabinet-makers.”

“How fearfully serious you all are!” said Madame de Caviare. “There is
that dreadful Canadian woman standing up,—what rubies!—how fond vulgar
women always are of rubies! That _passe-partout_ of hers is rather
pretty; gold thread on _blondine_ satin, is it not, Hilda? My glass is
not very strong——”

Lady Hilda looked through her glass, and decided the important point in
the affirmative.

“How she is rouged!” pursued the countess. “I am sure Altavante did not
lay _that_ on; he is much too artistic. Maurice, have you a cigarette?”

“It is not allowed, ma chère,” said the Lady Hilda.

“Pooh!” said Madame de Caviare, accepting a little delicate paper roll.
“It was very kind of you, Hilda, to remind me of that; you wished me to
enjoy it. Won’t you have one too?”

Lady Hilda said “No” with her fan.

“If the Rococo brought the Revolution, Duc,” she asked, “what will our
smoking bring?—the end of the world?”

“It will bring animosity of the sexes, abolition of the marriage-laws,
and large increase of paralysis,” replied M. de St. Louis, with great
decision.

“You have answered me without a compliment:—what flattery to my
intelligence!”

“Miladi, I never flatter you. I am not in the habit of imitating all the
world.”

“You look severe, Della Rocca,” said Madame Mila. “Do you disapprove of
women smoking?”

“Madame, a woman of grace lends grace to all she does, no doubt.”

“That is to say, you don’t approve it?”

“Madame, I merely doubt whether Lionardo would have painted Mona Lisa had
she smoked.”

“What a good idea you give me!—I will be painted by Millais or Cabanel,
smoking. It will be novel. The cigar shall be in my mouth. I will send
you the first photograph. Ah! there is Nordlingen; he will come over
here, and he is the greatest bore in Europe. You know what your king here
said when Nordlingen had bored him at three audiences about heaven knows
what: ‘I never knew the use of sentinels before: let that man be shot if
he ask audience again!’ We cannot shoot him; let us go to supper. Duc,
you will follow us, with M. des Gommeux?—and you too, Della Rocca? There
is that odious Canadian woman going; let us make haste; I should like to
see that blondine cloak close; I shall know whether it looks like Worth
or Pingat.”

She passed out on the Duc’s arm, and the Lady Hilda accepted Della
Rocca’s, while the well-trained Maurice, who knew his duties, rushed to
find the footman in the vestibule, and to arrest another gilded youth and
kindred spirit, a M. des Poisseux, whom Madame Mila had espied in the
crowd and charged him to bring with him to supper. Madame Mila preferred,
to all the world, the young men of her world of five-and-twenty or less;
they had no mind whatever, they had not character enough to be jealous,
and they were as full of the last new scandals as any dowager of sixty.

“They talk of the progress of this age: contrast M. de St. Louis with M.
des Gommeux and M. des Poisseux!” said the Lady Hilda, with her little
contemptuous smile.

Della Rocca laughed.

“You make me for the first time, madame, well content to belong to what
the Gommeux and the Poisseux would call a past generation. But there
are not many like our friend the Duc; he has stepped down to us from
the terraces of Marly; I am certain he went to sleep one night after a
gavotte with Montespan, and has only just awakened.”

The supper was gay and bright; Lady Hilda, rejecting chicken and
champagne and accepting only ice-water and cigarettes, deigned to be
amusing, though sarcastic, and Madame Mila was always in one of the two
extremes,—either syncope, sal volatile, and hysterics, or laughter,
frolic, smoke, and _risqué_ stories.

She and her sisterhood spend their lives in this see-saw; the first state
is for the mornings, when they remember their losses at play, their
lovers’ looks at other women, the compromising notes they have written,
and how much too much to be safe their maids know of them; the second
state is for the evenings, when they have their war-paint on, have taken
a little nip of some stimulant at afternoon tea, are going to half a
dozen houses between midnight and dawn, and are quite sure their lovers
never even see that any other women exist.

“He could not have a better illustration of the difference between a
woman with taste and a woman without it,” thought the Duc de St. Louis,
surveying the two; the countess had a million or two of false curls in a
tower above her pretty tiny face, was almost as _décolletée_ as a Guiza
picture, chirped the fashionable slang of the boulevards and salons in
the shrillest and swiftest of voices, and poured forth slanders that were
more diverting than decorous.

Lady Hilda was dressed like a picture of Marie Antoinette in 1770; her
rich hair was lifted from her low fair forehead in due keeping with
her costume; she swept aside her cousin’s naughty stories with as much
taste as contempt, and spoke a French which Marie Antoinette could have
recognized as the language in which Voltaire once scoffed and André
Chénier sighed. To be sure, she did smoke a little; but then even the
most perfect taste cannot quite escape the _cachet_ of its era.

“It was not necessary, my friend, to say that your place was so poor,”
said M. de St. Louis, as they went out of the hotel together: he had
known his companion from boyhood.

“I am not ashamed of my poverty,” said Della Rocca, somewhat coldly.
“Besides,” he added, with a laugh which had not much mirth in it, “our
poverty is as well known as that of the city. I think the most dishonest
Della Rocca could not conceal it by his adroitness, any more than
Floralia could conceal her public debt.”

“That may be, but neither you nor the town need proclaim the state of
your affairs,” said the Duc, who never gave up an opinion. “You should
let her be interested in you before you make it so evident that such
silence is quite permissible. You need say nothing; you need hide
nothing; you need only let things alone.”

“My dear Duc,” said Della Rocca, with a laugh that had merriment in it
and some irritation, “think for one moment of that woman’s position,
and say could anything ever induce her to change it,—except one thing?
Riches could add nothing to her; the highest rank could scarcely be any
charm to her; she has everything she can want or wish for;—if she had
the power of wishing left, which I doubt, the only spell that might
enchain her would be love, if she have any capacity to feel it, which I
doubt also.—Well, granted that aroused, what would poverty or riches in
her lover matter to one who has secure forever a golden pedestal of her
own from which to survey the wars of the world? She refused the Prince
of Deutschland; that I know, since he told me himself; and men do not
boast of rejections: what position, pray, would ever tempt her since she
refused Deutschland?—and he has all personal attractions, too, as well as
his future crown.”

“Still, granting all that, to make your lack of fortune so very
conspicuous is to render your purpose conspicuous also, and to draw her
attention to it unwisely,” said the Duc, who viewed all these matters
calmly, as a kind of mixture of diplomacy and business.

“Caro mio,” said Della Rocca, lightly, as he descended the last step, “be
very sure that if I ever have such a purpose your Lady Hilda has too much
wit not to perceive it in a day. But I have not such a purpose. I do not
like a woman who smokes.”

And with a good-night he walked away to his own house, which was a street
or two distant. The Duc chuckled, no wise discomfited.

“An Italian always swears he will never do the thing he means to do in an
hour,” he reflected, as he got in his cab.

The Della Rocca Palace was let to many tenants and in various divisions;
he himself retained only a few chambers looking upon the old quiet green
garden, high-walled, dark with ilex, and musical with fountains.

He crossed the silent courts, mounted the vast black stairways, and
entered his solitary rooms. There was a lamp burning; and his dog got up
and welcomed him. He slipped on an old velvet smoking-coat, lighted a
cigar, and sat down: the counsels and projects of M. de St. Louis were
not so entirely rejected by him as he had wished the Duc to suppose.

He admired her; he did not approve her; he was not even sure that he
liked her in any way; but he could not but see that here at last was the
marriage which would bring the resurrection of all his fortunes.

Neither did he feel any of the humility which he had expressed to M. de
St. Louis. Though she might be as cold as people all said she was, he had
little fear, if he once endeavored, he would fail in making his way into
her grace. With an Italian, love is too perfect a science for him to be
uncertain of its results.

Besides, he believed that he detected a different character in her to
what the world thought, and she also thought, was her own. He thought men
had all failed with her because they had not gone the right road to work.
After all, to make a woman in love with you was easy enough. At least he
had always found it so.

She was a woman, too, of unusual beauty, and of supreme grace, and a
great alliance; her money would restore him to the lost power of his
ancestors, and save a mighty and stainless name from falling into
that paralysis of poverty and that dust of obscurity which is sooner
or later its utter extinction. She seemed cast across his path by
a caress of Fortune, from which it would be madness to turn aside.
True, he had a wholly different ideal for his wife; he disliked those
world-famous _élégantes_; he disliked women who smoked and knew their
Paris as thoroughly as Houssaye or Dumas; he disliked the extravagant,
artificial, empty, frivolous life they led, their endless chase after
new excitements, and their insatiable appetite for “frissons nouveaux;”
he disliked their literature, their habits, their cynicism, their ennui,
their coldness, and their dissipations; he knew them well, and disliked
them in all things; what he desired in his wife were natural emotions,
unworn innocence, serenity, simplicity, and freshness of enjoyment:
though he was of the world, he did not care very much for it; he had a
meditative, imaginative temperament, and the whirl of modern society was
soon wearisome to him; on the other hand, he knew the world too well to
want a woman beside him who knew it equally well.

On the whole, the project of M. de St. Louis repelled as much as it
attracted him. Yet his wisdom told him that it was the marriage beyond
all others which would best fulfill his destiny in the way which from
his earliest years he had been accustomed to regard as inevitable; and
moreover there was something about her which charmed his senses, though
his judgment feared and in some things his taste disapproved her.

Besides, to make so self-engrossed a woman love,—he smiled as he sat and
smoked in the solitude of his great dim vaulted room, and then he sighed
impatiently.

After all, it was not a _beau rôle_ to woo a woman for the sheer sake
of her fortune; and he was too true a gentleman not to know it. And
what would money do for him if it were hers and not his?—it would only
humiliate him. He felt no taste for the position of a prince consort: it
would pass to his children certainly after him, and so raise up the old
name to its olden dignity; but for himself——

He got up and walked to the window; the clear winter stars, large
before morning, were shining through the iron bars and lozenged panes
of the ancient casement; the fountain in the cortile was shining in the
moonlight; the ducal coronet, carved in stone above the gateway, stood
out whitely from the shadows.

“After all, she would despise me, and I should despise myself,” he
thought: the old coronet had been sadly battered in war, but it had never
been chaffered and bought.




CHAPTER IV.


“What do you think of Della Rocca, Hilda?” asked Madame Mila at the same
hour that night, toasting her pink satin slipper before her dressing-room
fire.

Lady Hilda yawned, unclasping her _rivière_ of sapphires.

“He has a very good manner. There is some truth in what Olga Schouvaloff
always maintains, that after an Italian all other men seem boors.”

“I am sure Maurice is not a boor!” said the countess, pettishly.

“Oh, no, my dear: he parts his hair in the middle, talks the last new,
unintelligible, aristocratic _argot_, and he has the charms of every
actress and dancer in Paris catalogued clearly in a brain otherwise duly
clouded, as fashion requires, by brandy in the morning and absinthe
before dinner! Boors don’t do those things, nor yet get half as learned
as to Mlle. Rose Thé and la Petite Boulotte.”

Madame Mila reddened angrily.

“What spiteful things to say! He never looked at that hideous little
Boulotte, or any of the horrible creatures; and he never drinks; he is a
perfect gentleman.”

“Not quite that, ma chère; if he had been, he would either have dismissed
himself or made you dismiss your husband!”

Madame Mila raged in passionate wrath for five minutes, and then began to
cry a little, whimperingly.

Lady Hilda gathered up her _rivière_, took her candlestick, and bade her
good-night.

“It is no use making that noise, Mila,” she said, coolly. “You have
always known what I think; but you prefer to be in the fashion; of course
you must go on as you like; only please to remember,—don’t let _me_ see
too much of Des Gommeux.”

Madame Mila, left alone to the contemplation of her pink slippers, fumed
and sulked and felt very angry indeed; but she had borrowed a thousand
pounds some six or eight times from the Lady Hilda to pay her debts at
play; and of course it was such a trifle that she had always forgotten to
pay it again, because if ever she had any ready money there was always
some jeweler or man dress-maker, or creditor of some kind who would not
wait; and then, though it was not her fault, because she played as high
as she could any night she got a chance to do so, somehow or other she
generally lost, and never had a single sou to spare: so she muttered
her rage to the pink slippers alone, and decided that it was never worth
while to be put out about the Lady Hilda’s “ways.”

“She is a bit of ice herself,” she said to her slippers, and wondered how
Lady Hilda or anybody else could object to what she did, or see any harm
in it. Maurice always went to another hotel.

Mme. Mila lived her life in a manner very closely resembling that of the
horrible creatures Mlles. Rose Thé and Boulotte; really, when compared
by a cynic, there was very little difference to be found between those
persons and pretty Madame Mila.

But Rose Thé and Boulotte of course were creatures, and she was a very
great little lady, and went to all the courts and embassies in Europe,
and was sought and courted by the very best and stiffest people, being
very _chic_ and very rich, and very lofty in every way, and very careful
to make Maurice go to a different hotel.

She had had twenty Maurices in her time, indeed, but then the Count de
Caviare never complained, and was careful to drive with her in the Bois,
and pass at least three months of each year under the same roof with
her; so that nobody could say anything, it being an accepted axiom with
Society that when the husband does not object to his own dishonor there
is no dishonor at all in the matter for any one. If he be sensitive to
it, then indeed you must cut his wife, and there will be nothing too
bad to be said of her; but if he only do but connive at his own infamy
himself, then all is quite right, and everything is as it should be.

When the Prince of Cracow, with half Little Russia in his possession,
entertains the beautiful Lady Lightwood at a banquet at his villa at
Frascati, Richmond, or Auteuil, a score of gilded lackeys shout, “La
voiture de Madame la Comtesse!” the assembled guests receive her sweet
good-night, the Prince of Cracow bows low and thanks her for the honor
she has done to him, she goes out at the hall door, and the carriage
bowls away with loud crash and fiery steeds and rolls on its way out of
the park gates. Society is quite satisfied. Society knows very well that
a million roubles find their yearly way into the empty pockets of Lord
Lightwood, and that a little later the carriage will sweep round again to
a side-door hidden under the laurels wide open, and receive the beautiful
Lady Lightwood: but what is that to Society? It has seen her drive away:
that is quite sufficient; everybody is satisfied with that.

If you give Society very good dinners, Society will never be so ill-bred
as to see that side-door under your laurels.

Do drive out at the hall door; do,—for the sake of les Bienséances; that
is all Society asks of you: there are some things Society feels it owes
to Itself, and this is one of them.

Of course, whether you come back again or not, can be nobody’s business.

Society can swear to the fact of the hall door.

Madame Mila was attentive to the matter of the hall door; indeed,
abhorred a scandal,—it always made everything uncomfortable. She was
always careful of appearances. Even if you called on her unexpectedly,
Des Gommeux was always in an inner room, unseen, and you could declare
with a clear conscience that you never found him with her, were the oath
ever required in defense of her character. Of course, you have no sort of
business with who or what may be in inner rooms: Society does not require
you to search a house as if you were a detective.

If you can say, coolly, “Oh, there’s nothing in it; I never see him
there,” Society believes you, and is quite satisfied: that is, if it
wishes to believe you; if it do not wish, nothing would ever satisfy
it,—no, not though there rose one from the dead to bear witness.

Madame Mila would not have done anything to jeopardize her going to
courts, and having all the embassies to show her jewels in, for anything
that any man in the whole world could have offered her.

Madame Mila thought a woman who left her husband and made a scandal, a
horrid creature; nay, she was worse, she was a blunderer, and by her
blunder made a great deal of unpleasantness for other and wiser women.
After a stupid, open thing of that kind, Society always got so dreadfully
prudish for about three months, that it was disagreeable for everybody.
To run off with a man, and lose your settlements, and very likely have to
end in a boarding-house in Boulogne?—could anything be more idiotic?

Madame Mila thought that a woman so forgetting herself deserved even a
worse fate than the boarding-house. Madame Mila, who was quite content
that her husband should make a fool of himself about Blanche Souris,
or anybody else, so long as he walked arm-in-arm now and then with Des
Gommeux and called him “mon cher,” was indeed in every iota the true
Femme Galante of the nineteenth century.

The Femme Galante has passed through many various changes, in
many countries. The dames of the Decamerone were unlike the fair
athlete-seekers of the days of Horace; and the powdered coquettes of the
years of Molière were sisters only by the kinship of a common vice to the
frivolous and fragile fagot of impulses that is called Frou-frou.

The Femme Galante has always been a feature in every age. Poets,
from Juvenal to Musset, have railed at her; artists, from Titian to
Winterhalter, have painted her; dramatists, from Aristophanes to Congreve
and Beaumarchais and Dumas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her;
caricaturists, from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavarni,
have poured out their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of
to-day has been missed hitherto.

Frou-frou, who stands for her, is not in the least the true type.
Frou-frou is a creature that can love, can suffer, can repent, can die.
She is false in sentimentality and in art, but she is tender after
all; poor, feverish, wistful, changeful morsel of humanity,—a slender,
helpless, breathless, and frail thing, who, under one sad, short sin,
sinks down to death.

But Frou-frou is in no sense the true Femme Galante of her day. Frou-frou
is much more a fancy than a fact. It is not Frou-frou that Molière would
have handed down to other generations in enduring ridicule had he been
living now. To Frou-frou he would have doffed his hat with dim eyes; what
he would have fastened for all time in his pillory would have been a very
different, and far more conspicuous offender.

The Femme Galante, who has neither the scruples nor the follies of poor
Frou-frou; who neither forfeits her place nor leaves her lord; who has
studied adultery as one of the fine arts and made it one of the domestic
virtues; who takes her lover to her friends’ houses as she takes her muff
or her dog, and teaches her sons and daughters to call him by familiar
names; who writes notes of assignation with the same pen that calls her
boy home from school, and who smooths her child’s curls with the same
fingers that stray over her lover’s lips; who challenges the world to
find a flaw in her, and who smiles serene at her husband’s table on a
society she is careful to conciliate; who has woven the most sacred ties
and most unholy pleasures into so deft a braid that none can say where
one commences or the other ends; who uses the sanctity of her maternity
to cover the lawlessness of her license; and who, incapable alike of the
self-abandonment of love or of the self-sacrifice of duty, has not even
such poor, cheap honor as in the creatures of the streets may make guilt
loyal to its dupe and partner.

This is the Femme Galante of the passing century, who, with her hand on
her husband’s arm, babbles of her virtue in complacent boast, smiles in
her lover’s eyes, and, ignoring such a vulgar word as Sin, talks with a
smile of Friendship. Beside her Frou-frou were innocence itself, Marion
de L’Orme were honesty, Marion Leseant were purity, Cleopatra were
chaste, and Faustina were faithful.

She is the female Tartufe of seduction, the Précieuse Ridicule of
passion, the parody of Love, the standing gibe of Womanhood.




CHAPTER V.


The next day the Duca della Rocca left cards on Lady Hilda and the
Comtesse de Caviare, and then for a fortnight never went near either of
them, except to exchange a few words with them in other people’s houses.
M. de St. Louis, who was vastly enamored of his project, because it was
his project (what better reason has anybody?), was irritated and in
despair.

“You fly in the face of Fate!” he said, with much impatience.

Della Rocca laughed.

“There is no such person as Fate: she perished with all the rest of the
pagan world when we put up our first gas-lamp. The two I regret most of
them all are Faunus and Picus: nowadays we make Faunus into a railway
contractor, and shoot Picus for the market-stall.”

“You are very romantic,” said the Duc, with serene contempt. “It is
an unfortunate quality, and I confess,” he added, with a sigh, as
if confessing a blemish in a favorite horse, “that perhaps she is a
little deficient in the other extreme, a little too cold, a little too
unimpressionable; there is absolutely no shadow of cause to suppose she
ever felt the slightest emotion for any one. That gives, perhaps, a
certain hardness. It is not natural. ‘Une petite faiblesse donne tant de
charme.’”

“For a wife, one might dispense with the ‘petite faiblesse,’—for any one
else,” said Della Rocca, with a smile: the blemish did not seem much of
a fault in his eyes.

“That is a romantic notion,” said the Duc, with a little touch of
disdain. “In real truth, a woman is easier to manage who has had—a past.
She knows what to expect. It is flattering to be the first object of
passion to a woman. But it is troublesome: she exacts so much!”

“If I were not that, I have seldom cared to be anything,” said Della
Rocca.

“That is an Italian amorous fancy. Romeo and Othello are the typical
Italian lovers. I never can tell how a Northerner like Shakspeare could
draw either. You are often very unfaithful; but _while_ you are faithful
you are ardent, and you are absorbed in the woman. That is one of the
reasons why an Italian succeeds in love as no other man does. ‘L’art de
brûler silencieusement le cœur d’une femme,’ is a supreme art with you.
Compared with you, all other men are children. You have been the supreme
masters of the great passion since the days of Ovid.”

“Because it is much more the supreme pursuit of our lives than it is
with other men. How can Love be of much power where it is inferior to
fox-hunting, and a mere interlude when there is no other sport to be had,
as it is with Englishmen?”

“And with a Frenchman it is always inferior to himself!” confessed the
French Duc, with a smile. “At least they say so. But every human being
loves his vanity first. ‘Only wounded my vanity?’ poor Lord Strangford
used to say. ‘Pray, what dearer and more integral part of myself could
you wound?’ He was very right. If we are not on good terms with
ourselves, we can never prevail with others.”

“Yet a vain man seldom succeeds with women.”

“A man who lets them see that he is vain does not: that is another
matter. Vanity—ah! there is Miladi, she has plenty of vanity; yet it is
of a grandiose kind, and it would only take a little more time and the
first gray hairs to turn it into dissatisfaction. All kinds of discontent
are only superb vanities,—Byron’s, Musset’s, Bolingbroke’s——”

A horse nearly knocked the Duc down in the midst of his philosophies as
he picked his way delicately among the standing and moving carriages to
the place where the white great-coats with the black velvet collars of
the Lady Hilda’s servants were visible.

The Lady Hilda’s victoria stood in that open square where it is the
pleasure of fashionable Floralia to stop its carriages in the course of
the drive before dinner.

The piazza is the most unlovely part of the park; it has a gaunt red café
and a desert of hard-beaten sand, and in the middle there are some few
plants, and a vast quantity of iron bordering laid out in geometrical
patterns, with more hard-beaten sand between them, this being the modern
Floralian idea of a garden; to which fatal idea are sacrificed the noble
ilex shades, the bird-filled cedar groves, the deep delicious dreamful
avenues, the moss-grown ways, and the leaf-covered fountains, worthy to
shelter Narcissus and to bathe Nausicaa, which their wiser forefathers
knew were alike the blessing and the glory of this land of the sun.

Nevertheless,—perhaps because it is the last place in the world where
anybody with any gleam of taste would be supposed ever voluntarily
to stop a carriage,—here motley modern society delights to group its
fusing nationalities; and the same people who bored each other in the
morning’s calls, and will bore each other in the evening’s receptions,
bore each other sedulously in the open air, and would not omit the sacred
ceremonial for anything,—unless, indeed, it rained.

Perhaps, after all, Floralia reads aright the generation that visits it.
The ilex shadows and the cedar groves need Virgil and Horace, Tasso and
Petrarca, Milton and Shelley.

The Lady Hilda, who never by any chance paused in the piazzone, had
stopped a moment there, to please Madame Mila, who, in the loveliest
Incroyable bonnet, was seated beside her.

The men of their acquaintance flocked up to the victoria. Lady Hilda paid
them scanty attention, and occupied herself buying flowers of the poor
women who lifted their fragrant basket-loads to the carriage. Madame Mila
chattered like the brightest of parroquets, and was clamorous for news.

“Quid novi?” is the cry in Floralia from morning till night, as in
Athens. The most popular people are those who, when the article is not
to be had of original growth, can manufacture it. Political news nobody
attends to in Floralia; financial news interests society a little more,
because everybody has stocks or shares in something somewhere; but
_the_ news is gossip,—dear delicious perennial ever-blessed gossip,
that reports a beloved friend in difficulties, a rival _in extremis_, a
neighbor no better than she should be, and some exalted personage or
another caught hiding a king in his sleeve at cards or kissing his wife’s
lady-of-the-bedchamber.

Gossip goes the round of the city in winter as the lemonade-stands do in
summer.

If you wish to be _choyé_ and asked out every night, learn to manufacture
it; it is very easy: take equal parts of flour of malice and essence of
impudence, with several pepper-corns of improbability to spice it, some
candied lemon-peel of moral reflections, and a few drops of the ammonia
of indecency that will make it light of digestion, and the toothsome
morsel will procure you welcome everywhere.

If you can also chop up any real Paschal lamb of innocence in very fine
pieces, so that it is minced and hashed and unrecognizable forever,
serve the mince with the vinegar of malignity, and the fresh mint of
novelty, and you will be the very Carême of gossip henceforward. Run
about society with your concoctions in and out of the best houses, as
fast as you can go, and there will be no end to your popularity. You
will be as refreshing to the thirst of the dwellers in them as are the
lemonade-sellers to the throats of the populace.

Perhaps Fate still lurked and worked in the Latin land, and had hidden
herself under the delicate marabouts of the chapeau Incroyable; at any
rate, Madame Mila welcomed the Duc and his companion with eagerness, and
engaged them both to dinner with her on the morrow in a way that there
was no refusing.

Madame Mila was discontented with the news of the day. All her young
men could only tell her of one person’s ruin,—poor Victor de Salaris’,
which she had always predicted and contributed to cause, and which was
therefore certainly the more agreeable,—and two scenes between married
people whom she knew: one because the brute of a husband would not
allow his wife to have her tallest footman in silk stockings; the other
because the no less a brute of a husband would not let _his_ wife have
a Friendship. Madame Mila scarcely knew which refusal to condemn as the
most heartless and the most vulgar.

The Lady Hilda dined with her on the morrow; and the little Comtesse,
with the fine instinct at discovering future sympathies of a woman “qui a
vecu,” took care that Della Rocca took her cousin in to dinner.

“I would give all I possess to see Hilda _attendrie_,” she said to
herself. As what she possessed just then was chiefly an enormous quantity
of unpaid bills, perhaps she would not have lost so very much. But the
Lady Hilda was not _attendrie_: she thought he talked better than most
men,—at least, differently,—and he succeeded in interesting her probably
because he had been so indifferent in calling upon her. That was all.
Besides, his manner was perfect; it was as _vieille cour_ as M. de St.
Louis’s.

Lady Hilda, who should have been born under Louis Quatorze, suffered much
in her taste from an age when manner, except in the South, is only a
tradition, smothered under cigar-ash and buried in a gun-case.

As for him, he mused, while he talked to her, on the words of the Duc,
who had known her all her life. Was it true that she had never felt even
a passing “weakness”? Was it certain that she had always been as cold as
she looked?

He wished that he could be sure.

After all, she was a woman of wonderful charm, though she did go about
with Madame Mila, smoke cigarettes after dinner, and correct you as to
the last _mot_ made on the boulevards. He began to think that this was
only the mere cachet of the world she lived in,—only the mere accident of
contact and habit.

All women born under the Second Empire have it more or less; and, after
all, she had but little of it; she was very serene, very contemptuous,
very high-bred; and her brilliant, languid, hazel eyes looked so
untroubled that it would have moved any man to wish to trouble their
still and luminous depths.

She seemed to him very objectless and somewhat cynical. It was a pity.
Nature had made her perfect in face and form, and gifted her with
intelligence, and Fashion had made her useless, tired, and vaguely
cynical about everything, as everybody else was in her world; except
that yet larger number who resembled Madame Mila,—a worse type still,
according to his view.

It was a pity, so he thought, watching the droop of her long eyelashes,
the curve of her beautiful mouth, the even coming and going of her breath
under her shining necklace of opals and emeralds.

He began to believe that the Duc was right. There was no “past” in that
calmest of indolent glances.

“You smoke, madame?” he said, a little abruptly to her, after dinner.

She looked at her slender roll of paper.

“It is a habit,—like all the rest of the things one does. I do not care
about it.”

“Why do it, then? Are you not too proud to follow a habit, and imitate a
folly?”

She smiled a little, and let the cigarette pale its ineffectual fires and
die out.

“They have not known how to deal with her,” he thought to himself; and he
sat down and played écarté, and allowed her to win, though he was one of
the best players in Europe.

Fate had certainly been under the Incroyable bonnet of Madame Mila. For
during the evening she suddenly recalled his villa, and announced her
intention of coming to see it. In her little busy brain there was a
clever notion that if she only could get her cousin once drawn into what
the Duc would call a “petite faiblesse,” she herself would hear no more
lectures about Maurice; and lectures are always tiresome, especially when
the lecturer has lent you several thousands, that it would be the height
of inconvenience ever to be reminded to repay.

A woman who has “petites faiblesses” is usually impatient with one who
has none; the one who has none is a kind of standing insolence. Women
corrupt more women than men do. Lovelace does not hate chastity in women;
but Lady Bellaston does with all her might.

Pretty Madame Mila was too good-natured and also too shallow to hate
anything; but if she could have seen her cousin “compromised” she would
have derived an exquisite satisfaction and entertainment from the sight.
She would also have felt that Lady Hilda would have become thereby more
natural and more comfortable company.

“Dear me! she might have done anything she had liked all these years,”
thought Madame Mila; “nobody would have known anything; and nothing would
hurt her if it were known, whilst she has all that money.”

For Madame Mila herself, perched on one of the very topmost rungs of the
ladder of the world’s greatness, and able therefore to take a bird’s-eye
view therefrom of everything, was very shrewd in her way, and knew that
society never was known yet to quarrel with the owner of fifty thousand a
year.

So she carried her airy little person, laden to-night with gold
embroideries on dull Venetian red until she looked like a little figure
made in lac, over to the écarté-table when the écarté was finished, and
arranged a morning at Palestrina for the day after to-morrow. He could
only express his happiness and honor, and his regrets that Palestrina was
little more than an empty shell for their inspection.

The day after the morrow was clear and cloudless, balmy and
delicious,—such days as the Floralian climate casts here and there
generously amidst the winter cold, as a foretaste of its paradise of
summer. The snow was on the more distant mountains of course, but only
made the landscape more lovely, changing to the softest blush color and
rose under the brightness of the noonday sun. The fields were green with
the springing cereals; the pine woods were filling with violets; the
water-courses were brimming and boisterously joyous.

It was winter still, but the sort of winter that one would expect in
fairy-land or in the planet Venus.

Madame Mila, clad in the strictest Directoire costume, with a wonderful
hat on her head that carried feathers, grasses, oleander-flowers, and a
bird of Dutch Guiana, and was twisted up on one side in a manner known
only to Caroline Reboux, descended with her Maurice to the Lady Hilda’s
victoria, lent her for the day. To drive into the country at all was an
act abominable and appalling to all her ideas.

In Paris, except on race-days, she never went farther than the lake, and
never showed her toilettes at Versailles in the Assembly, because of the
endless drive necessary as a means to get there.

In country-houses she carefully kept her own room till about five
o’clock; and, when forced for her health to go to Vichy, or St. Moritz,
or any such place, she played cards in the mornings, and, when she was
obliged to go out, looked at the other invalids’ dresses. Mountains
were only unpleasant things to be tunneled; forests were tolerable,
because one could wear such pretty Louis Quinze hunting-habits and the
_curée_ by torchlight was nice; the sea, again, was made endurable by
bathing-costumes, and it was fun to go and tuck up your things and hunt
for prawns or pearls in the rock-pools and shallows,—it gave rise to many
very pretty situations. But merely to drive into the country!—it was only
fit occupation for a maniac. Though she had proposed it herself, the
patient Maurice had a very _mauvais quart-d’heure_ as they drove.

The Lady Hilda, who was too truly great an _élégante_ ever to condescend
in the open air to the eccentricities and bizarreries of Madame
Mila,—mountebankisms worthy a traveling show, she considered them to
be,—was clad in her black sable, which contrasted so well with the
fairness of her skin, and drove out with the Princess Olga, Carlo Maremma
and M. de St. Louis fronting them in their Schouvaloff barouche. She did
not hate the cold, and shiver from the fresh sea-wind, and worry about
the badness of the steep roads, as Madame Mila did; on the contrary, she
liked the drive, long though it was, and felt a vague interest in the
first sights of Palestrina, its towers and belfries shining white on the
mountain-side, with the little villages clustered under its broad dark
ring of forest.

“What a pity that Paolo is so poor!” said Carlo Maremma, looking upward
at it.

“He carries his poverty with infinite grace,” said the Princess Olga.

“He is worthy of riches,” said the Duc.

Lady Hilda said nothing.

Palestrina was twelve miles and more from the city, and stood on the high
hills facing the southwest; it was half fortress, half palace; in early
times its lords had ruled from its height all the country round; and
later on, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, a great cardinal
of the Della Rocca had made it into as sumptuous a dwelling-place as
Caprarola or Poggio a Cajano.

Subsequently the family had ranged itself against the ruling faction of
the province, and had suffered from war and confiscation; still later,
Palestrina had been plundered by the French troops of Napoleon; yet,
despoiled and impoverished as it was, it was majestic still, and even
beautiful; for, unlike most such places, it had kept its girdle of oak
and ilex woods; and its gardens, though wild and neglected, were unshorn
of their fair proportions; and the fountains fell into their marble
basins, and splashed the maidenhair ferns that hung over them, as they
had done in another age for the delight of the great cardinal and his
favorites.

Della Rocca received them in the southern loggia, a beautiful vaulted and
frescoed open gallery, designed by Bramante, and warm in the noonday sun
as though January were June.

A king could not have had more grace of welcome and dignity of courtesy
than this ruined gentleman; he had a very perfect manner, certainly,
thought the Lady Hilda once again. She was one of those women (they are
many) upon whom manner makes more impression than mind or morals. Why
should it not? It is the charm of life and the touchstone of breeding.

There was only one friend with him, a great minister, who had retired
from the world and given himself up to the culture of roses and
strawberries. There was a simple repast, from the produce of his own
lands, ready in what had been once the banqueting-hall. It was made
graceful by the old Venetian glass, the old Urbino plates, the old
Cellini salt-cellars; and by grapes, regina and salamana, saved from
the autumn, and bouquets of Parma violets and Bengal roses, in old blue
Savona vases. It was a frugal meal, but fit for the tale-tellers of the
Decamerone.

They rambled over the great building first, with its vast windows showing
the wide landscape of mountain and plain, and far away the golden domes
and airy spires of the city shining through a soft mist of olive-trees.
The glory of this house was gone, but it was beautiful still, with the
sweet clear sunlight streaming through its innumerable chambers, and
touching the soft hues of frescoed walls that had grown faded with age
but had been painted by Spinello, by Francia, by the great Frate, and by
a host whose names were lost, of earnest workers, and men with whom art
had been religion.

It was all dim and worn and gray with the passage of time; but it was
harmonious, majestic, tranquil. It was like the close of a great life
withdrawn from the world into a cloistered solitude and content to be
alone with its God.

“Do not wish for riches,” said the Lady Hilda to him, as he said
something to her of it. “If you had riches you would desecrate this; you
would ‘restore’ it, you would ‘embellish’ it, you would ruin it.”

He smiled a little sadly.

“As it is, I can only keep the rains from entering and the rats from
destroying it. Poverty, madame, is only poetical to those who do not
suffer it. Look!” he added, with a laugh, “you will not find a single
chair, I fear, that is not in tatters.”

She glanced at the great old ebony chair she was resting in, with its
rich frayed tapestry seat, and its carved armorial bearings.

“I have suffered much more from the staring, gilded, and satin
abominations in a millionaire’s drawing-room. You are ungrateful——”

“And you, madame, judge of pains that have never touched and cannot touch
you. However, I can be but too glad that Palestrina pleases you in any
way. It has the sunshine of heaven, though not of fortune.”

“And I am sure you would not give it up for all the wealth of the
Rothschilds.”

“No.”

“How lovely this place would look,” Madame Mila was saying at the same
moment, out of his hearing, to the Princess Olga, “if Owen Jones could
renovate it and Huby furnish it! Fancy it with all the gilding re-gilded,
and the pictures restored, and Aubusson and Persian carpets everywhere,
and all those horrid old tapestries, that must be full of spiders, pulled
down and burnt. What a heavenly place it would be!—and what balls one
might give in it! Why, it would hold ten thousand people!”

“Poor Paolo will never be able to do it,” said the Princess Schouvaloff,
“unless——”

She glanced at the Lady Hilda where she sat at the farther end of the
chamber, whilst Della Rocca leaned against the embrasure of the window.

“I think she has a fancy for him,” said Madame Mila. “But as for
marrying, you know,—that, of course, is out of the question.”

“I don’t see why,” said the princess.

“Oh, out of the question,” said Madame Mila, hastily. “But if she
should take a liking to him, it would be great fun. She’s been so
awfully _exaltée_ about all that sort of thing. Dear me! what a pity
all those nasty, old, dull frescoes can’t be scraped off and something
nice and bright, like what they paint now, be put there! but I suppose
it would take so much money. I should hang silk over them; all these
clouds of pale angels would make me melancholy mad. There is no style
I care a bit for but Louis Quinze. I am having new wall-hangings for
my saloon done by the Ste. Marie Réparatrice girls; a lovely green
satin,—apple-green,—embroidered with wreaths of roses and broom, after
flower-groups by Fantin. Louis Quinze is so cheerful, and lets you have
such lots of gilding, and the tables have such nice straight legs, and
you always feel with it as if you were in a theatre and expecting the
_Jeune Premier_ to enter. Here one feels as if one were in a church.”

“A monastery,” suggested Princess Olga.

Thereon they went and had their luncheon, and Madame Mila, studying
the Capo di Monte dessert-service, appraised its value,—for she was a
shrewd little woman,—and wondered, if Paolo della Rocca were so poor as
they said, why did he not send up all these old porcelains and lovely
potteries to the Hôtel Drouot: Capo di Monte, she reflected, sells for
more than its weight in gold, now that it is the rage of the fashion. She
felt inclined to suggest this to him, only she was not quite sure how
he might take it. Italians, she had heard, were so absurdly proud and
susceptible.

After luncheon, they went into the green old gardens, green with ilex
and arbutus and laurel and cypress avenues, although it was mid-winter;
and the great minister discoursed on the charms of the country and the
beauty of solitude in a way that should almost have awakened the envy of
Horace in his grave; and the Duc de St. Louis disagreed with him in witty
arguments that might have made the shades of Rochefoucauld and Rivarôl
jealous.

And they rambled and idled and talked and sauntered in those charming
hours which an Italian villa alone can create; and then the Ave Maria
chimed from the belfries of a convent up above on the hill, and the winds
grew chill, and the carriages were called round to the steps of the
southern terrace, and the old steward brought to each lady the parting
gift of a great cluster of the sweet Parma violets.

“Well, it’s been pleasanter than I thought for,” said Madame Mila,
rolling homeward. “But, oh, this wretched, odious road! I shall catch my
death of cold!”

Lady Hilda was very silent as they drove downward, and left Palestrina
alone to grow gray in the shades of the twilight.




CHAPTER VI.


“I think Italians are like Russian tea; they spoil you for any other——”
wrote Lady Hilda to her brother Clairvaux. It was not a very clear
phrase, nor very grammatical; but she knew what she meant herself,—which
is more than all writers can say they do.

Russian tea, or rather tea imported through Russia, is so much softer and
of so much sweeter and subtler a flavor, that once drinking it you will
find all other tea after it seem flat or coarse. When she had written
this sentiment, however, she tore up the sheet of note-paper which
contained it, and tossed it in the fire: after all, Clairvaux would not
understand,—he never understood anything, dear old fellow,—and he would
be very likely to say all sorts of foolish things which there was not the
slightest reason for any one’s supposing.

“Do come out here as soon as you can,” she wrote, instead. “Of course it
will all depend on your racing engagements; but if you do go to Paris to
see Charles Lafitte, as you say, pray come on here. Not that you will
care for Floralia at all; you never do care for these art cities, and
it is its art, and its past, and its people that make its irresistible
charm. Floralia is so graceful and so beautiful and so full of noble
memories that one cannot but feel the motley society of our own present
day as a sort of desecration to it; the cocottes and cococdettes,
the wheel-skaters and poker-players, the smokers and the baigneuses
of our time suit it sadly ill: it wants the scholars of Academe, the
story-tellers of Boccaccio; it wants Sordello and Stradella, Desdemona
and Giulietta.

“One feels oneself not one-half good enough for the stones one treads
upon; life here should be a perpetual Kyrie Eleison; instead of which, it
is only a chorus of Offenbach’s. Not that society anywhere now ever does
rise higher than that; only here it jars on one more than elsewhere, and
seems as profane as if one ‘played ball with Homer’s skull.’

“Floralia is a golden Ostensoir filled with great men’s bones, and we
choke it up with cigar-ashes and champagne-dregs. It cannot be helped,
I suppose. The destiny of the age seems to be to profane all that have
preceded it. It creates nothing,—it desecrates everything. Society
does not escape from the general influence; its kings are all kings of
Brentford.

“Mila—who is here and happy as a bird—thinks Jack Cade and the Offenbach
chorus the perfection of delight at all times.

“For myself, I confess, neither entertains me; I fail to see the charm
of a drawing-room democracy _décolleté_ and _découssue_; and I never did
appreciate ladies who pass their lives in balancing themselves awkwardly
on the bar of Dumas’s famous Triangle; but that may be a prejudice,—Mila
says that it is.

“By-the-by, that odious young Des Gommeux has followed her here. I
make myself disagreeable to him. I cannot do more. Spiridion has never
interfered, and ‘on ne peut pas être plus royaliste que le roi.’ But you
will skip all this, or give it to your wife. I know I never read letters
myself, so why should I expect you to do so? I am so sorry to hear of
Vieille Garde’s sprain; it is too vexing for you, just as he was so high
in the betting. I hope Sister to Simonides turns out worth all we gave
for her. There will be racing here in April, but it would only make you
laugh,—which would be rude; or swear,—which would be worse. So please
come long before it.”

She folded up her letter, wrote “Pray try and come soon” across the top
of it, and directed the envelope to the Earl of Clairvaux, Broomsden,
Northampton, and then was provoked to think that she did not want good,
clumsy, honest Clairvaux to come at all,—not in her heart of hearts,
because Clairvaux was always asking questions, and going straight to the
bottom of things in his own simple, sturdy fashion, and never understood
anything that was in the very least complex.

And then, again, she was more irritated still with herself, for
admitting even to her own thoughts that there was anything complex or
that she did not want to examine too closely,—just yet. And then she sat
and looked into the fire, and thought of Palestrina, with its sweet faint
scent of Parma violets, and its dim noble frescoes, and its mountain
solitudes, under the clear winter moon.

She sat dreaming about it a long time,—for her, because she was not a
person that dreamed at all usually. Her life was too brilliant, and too
much occupied, and too artificial. She was thinking, with a great deal
of money, without desecrating it by “restoration,” but by bringing all
the art knowledge in the world to its enrichment, it would be possible
to make it as great as it had been in the days of its cardinal. What a
pastime it would be, what an interest, what an occupation almost for a
lifetime, to render that grand old palace once more the world’s wonder it
had been in the sixteenth century!

Then she rose suddenly with an impatient sigh, and went into her
bedroom, and found fault with her maids: they had put Valenciennes on
her petticoats, and she hated Valenciennes,—no other laces had been so
cheapened by imitation; they had put out her marron velvet with the
ostrich feathers for that day’s wearing, when they should have laid out
the silver-gray cloth with the Genoa buttons; they were giving her glacé
gloves instead of peau de Suède; they had got out Pompadour boots, and
she required Paysanne shoes,—it was a fine dry day. In point of fact,
everything was wrong, and they were idiots, and she told them so as
strongly as a high-bred lady can demean herself to speak. Each costume
was put all together,—dress, bonnet, boots, gloves,—everything; what
business had they to go and mix them all up and make everything wrong?

Her maids were used to her displeasure; but, as she was very generous,
and if they were ill or in sorrow she was kind, they bore it meekly, and
contented themselves with complaining of her in all directions to their
allies.

“If she would only have her petites affaires like other ladies, she
would be much easier to content,” said her head maid, who had served the
aristocracy ever since the earliest days of the Second Empire.

When there were no lovers, there were much fewer douceurs and
perquisites; however, they endured that deprivation, because Miladi was
so very rich and so easily plundered.

Miladi now, arrayed in the silver-gray cloth with the Genoa buttons and
the marabout feather trimming, went out to her victoria, en route to the
galleries, of which she never tired, and the visits which immeasurably
bored her. She had been in the great world for ten years, and the great
world is too small to divert one for very long, unless one be as Madame
Mila.

Nevertheless, the Lady Hilda found that Floralia interested her more than
she would have believed that anything would do.

After all, Floralia was charming by the present, not only by the past.
If it had its kings of Brentford, with Offenbach choruses, so had every
other place; if it had a pot-pourri of nationalities, it had some of the
most agreeable persons of every nation; if trying to be very naughty it
generally only became very dull,—that was the doom of modern society
everywhere.

There were charming houses in it, where there were real wit, real music,
and real welcome. If people saw each other too often, strong friendships
could come out of such frequency as well as animosities; there was a
great charm in the familiar, easy, pleasant intimacies which so naturally
grew out of the artistic idling under these sombre and noble walls, and
in the palaces where all the arts once reigned.

She had begun to take the fair city into her heart, as every one who has
a heart must needs do, once having dwelt within the olive girdle of its
pure pale hills, and seen its green waters wash the banks erst peopled
with the gorgeous splendors of the Renaissance.

She even began to like her daily life in it; the mornings dreamed away
before some favorite Giorgione or Veronese, or spent in dim old shops
full of the oddest mingling of rubbish and of treasure; the twilights
spent in picture-like old chambers, where dames of high degree had
made their winter-quarters, fragrant with flowers and quaint with old
tapestries and porcelains; the evenings passed in a society which, too
motley to be intimate, yet too personal to dare be witty, was gradually
made more than endurable to her, by the sound of one voice for which she
listened more often than she knew, by the sight of one face which grew
more necessary to her than she was aware.

“If one could be only quite alone here it would be too charming,” she
thought, driving this morning, while the sun shone on the golden reaches
of the river, and the softly-colored marbles caught the light, and the
picturesque old shops gleamed many-hued as Harlequin under the beetling
brows of projecting roofs and the carved stone of dark archways.

But if she had looked close into her own heart she would have seen
that the solitude of her ideal would have been one like the French
poet’s,—solitude _à deux_.

She did not go, after all, to her visits; she went, instead, in and out
of the studios whose artists adored her, though she was terribly hard to
please, and had much more acquaintance with art than is desirable in a
purchaser.

In one of the studios she chanced to meet the master of Palestrina; and
he went with her to another _atelier_, and another, and another.

She had her Paysanne shoes on, and her gold-headed cane, and let her
victoria stand still while she walked from one to the other of those
sculptors’ and painters’ dens, which lie so close together, like beavers’
work, in the old gray quarters of the city.

Up and down the dark staircases, and in and out the gloomy vaulted
passages, her silver-gray cloth with the marabout ruches gleamed and
glistened, and to many of the artists proved as beneficent as a silvery
cloud to the thirsty field in summer.

She was surprised to find how much she liked it. There was not much
genius, and there was a great deal of bad drawing, and worse modeling,
and she had educated herself in the very strictest and coldest lessons
of art, and really cared for nothing later than Luca Signorelli, and
abhorred Canova and everything that has come after him. But there
were some little figures in marble of young children that she could
conscientiously buy; and the little Meissonnier and Fortuny-like pictures
were clever, if they were mere trick-work and told no story; and the
modern oak carvings were really good; and on the whole she enjoyed her
morning unusually; and her companion looked pleased, because she found
things to praise.

As she walked, with Della Rocca beside her, in and out the dusky
passage-ways, with the obnoxious Valenciennes under her skirts sweeping
the stones, and her silvery marabouts glancing like hoar-frost in the
shadows of the looming walls, the Lady Hilda felt very happy, and on good
terms with herself and the world. No doubt, she thought, it was the fresh
west wind blowing up the river from the sea which had done her so much
good.

The golden Ostensoir, to which she had likened Floralia, no longer seemed
filled with cigar-ash and absinthe-dregs, but full of the fragrant
rose-leaves of an imperishable Past, and the shining sands of a sweet
unspent Time.

She made a poor sculptor happy for a year; she freed a young and
promising painter from a heavy debt; she was often impatient with their
productions, but she was most patient with their troubles.

She was only a woman of the world, touched for a day into warmer
sympathies, but the blessings she drew down on her sank somehow into her
heart, and made her half ashamed, half glad.

What was the use of writing fine contemptuous things of society unless
one tried to drop oneself some little holy relic into the golden
Reliquary? She went home contented, and was so gentle with her maids that
they thought she must be going to be unwell.

Her friend the Princess Olga came to chat with her, and they had their
tea cosily in her dressing-room; and at eight o’clock she went to dine
with Mrs. Washington, an American Parisienne or Parisian American, known
wherever the world of fashion extended, and was taken in to dinner by the
Duca della Rocca.

After dinner there was a new tenor, who was less of a delusion than most
new tenors are; and there was a great deal of very æsthetic and abstruse
talk about music; she said little herself, but sat and listened to Della
Rocca, who spoke much and eloquently with infinite grace and accurate
culture. To a woman who has cared for no one all her life, there is the
strangest and sweetest pleasure in finding at last one voice whose mere
sound is melody to her.

On the whole, she went to bed still with that dreamful content which had
come on her in the day,—no doubt with the fresh sea-wind. She knew that
she had looked at her best in a dress of pale dead-gold, with old black
Spanish lace; and she had only one regret,—that in too soft a mood she
had allowed an English person, a Lady Featherleigh, of whom she did not
approve, to be presented to her.

She was habitually the one desire and the one despair of all her
countrywomen.

Except so far as her physical courage, her skill in riding, and her
beautiful complexion, which no cold could redden, and no heat could
change, might be counted as national characteristics, the Lady Hilda was
a very un-English Englishwoman in everything.

Indeed, your true _élégante_ is raised high above all such small things
as nationalities; she floats serenely in an atmosphere far too elevated
to be colored by country,—a neutral ground on which the leaders of every
civilized land meet far away from all ordinary mortality.

In Floralia she found a few such choice spirits accustomed to breathe the
same ether as herself, and with those she lived, carefully avoiding the
Penal Settlement, as she continued to call the cosmopolitan society which
was outside the zone of her own supreme fashion.

She saw it, indeed, in ball-rooms and morning receptions; it sighed
humbly after her, pined for her notice, and would have been happy if
she would but even have recompensed it by an insolence; but she merely
ignored its existence, and always looked over its head innocently and
cruelly with that divine serenity of indifference and disdain with which
Nature had so liberally endowed her.

“Why should I know them? They wouldn’t please me,” she would say to those
who ventured to remonstrate; and the answer was unanswerable.

“I can’t think how you manage, Hilda, to keep so clear of people,”
said Madame Mila, enviously. “Now, _I_ get inundated with hosts of the
horridest——”

“Because you cheapen yourself,” said Lady Hilda, very coolly.

“I never could keep people off me,” pursued the Comtesse. “When Spiridion
had the Embassy in London, it was just the same; I was inundated! It’s
good nature, I suppose. Certainly you haven’t got too much of _that_.”

Lady Hilda smiled; she thought of those six or eight thousands which had
gone for Madame Mila’s losses at play.

“Good nature is a very indifferent sort of quality,” she answered. “It is
compounded of weakness, laziness, and vulgarity. Generally speaking, it
is only a desire for popularity; and there is nothing more vulgar than
_that_.”

“I don’t see that it is vulgar at all,” said Madame Mila, with some
sharpness. “I like to think I am popular; to see a mob look after me; to
have the shop-boys rush out to get a glimpse of me; to hear the crowd on
a race-day call out, ‘Ain’t she a rare ’un! my eye, ain’t she fit!’ just
as if I were one of the mares. I often give a crossing-sweeper a shilling
in London, just to make him ‘bless my pretty eyes.’ Why, even when I go
to that beastly place of Spiridion’s in Russia, I make the hideous serfs
in love with me; it puts one on good terms with oneself. I often think
when the people in the streets don’t turn after me as I go—then I _shall_
know that I’m old!”

Lady Hilda’s eyebrows expressed unutterable contempt; these were
sentiments to her entirely incomprehensible.

“How very agreeable!—to make the streets the barometer of one’s
looks,—‘fair or foul’! So you live in apprehension of a railway porter’s
indifference, and only approve of yourself if a racing tout smiles! My
dear Mila, I never did believe you would have gone lower in the scale of
human adorers than your Gommeux and Poisseux.”

“At all events, I am not so vain as you are, Hilda,” retorted the
Comtesse. “_You_ approve of yourself eternally, whether all the world
hates you or not. I remember Charlie Barrington saying of you once, ‘I
wonder why that woman keeps straight. Why should she? She don’t care a
hang what anybody says of her.’”

“How discerning of Lord Barrington! If people only ‘keep straight’ for
the sake of what other people say of them, I think they may just as well
‘go off the rails’ in any manner they like. Certainly, what I chose to
do, I should do, without reference to the approbation of the mob,—either
of the streets or of the drawing-rooms.”

“Exactly what Barrington said,” returned Madame Mila; “but then why do
you—I mean, why don’t you—amuse yourself?”

The Lady Hilda laughed.

“My dear, the Gommeux and the Poisseux would not amuse me. I am not so
happily constituted as you are.”

Madame Mila colored.

“That’s all very fine talk, but you know it isn’t natural——”

“To live decently?—no, I suppose it is not nowadays. Perhaps it never
was. But, my dear Mila, you needn’t be too disquieted about me. If it
make you any more comfortable as to my sanity, I can assure you it is not
virtue; no one knows such a word; it is only indifference.”

“You are very queer, Hilda,” said Madame Mila, impatiently: “all I know
is, I should like to see you in love, and see what you’d say _then_.”

The Lady Hilda, who was never more moved by her feather-headed
cousin’s words than a rock by a butterfly, felt a sudden warmth on her
face,—perhaps of anger.

“In love!” she echoed, with less languor and more of impetuosity than she
had ever displayed; “are you ever in love, any of you, ever? You have
senses and vanity and an inordinate fear of not being in the fashion;
and so you take your lovers as you drink your stimulants and wear your
wigs and tie your skirts back,—because everybody else does it, and not
to do it is to be odd, or prudish, or something you would hate to be
called. Love! it is an unknown thing to you all. You have a sort of
miserable hectic passion, perhaps, that is a drug you take as you take
chlorodyne,—just to excite you and make your jaded nerves a little alive
again,—and yet you are such cowards that you have not even the courage of
passion, but label your drug Friendship, and beg Society to observe that
you only keep it for family uses, like arnica or like glycerine. You want
notoriety; you want to indulge your fancies, and yet keep your place in
the world. You like to drag a young man about by a chain, as if he were
the dancing monkey that you depended upon for subsistence. You like other
women to see that you are not too _passée_ to be every whit as improper
as if you were twenty. You like to advertise your successes as it were
with drum and trumpet, because if you did not, people might begin to
doubt that you had any. You like all that, and you like to feel there is
nothing you do not know and no length you have not gone, and so you ring
all the changes on all the varieties of intrigue and sensuality, and go
over the gamut of sickly sentiment and nauseous license as an orchestra
tunes its strings up every night! That is what all you people call love.
I am content enough to have no knowledge of it——”

“Good gracious, Hilda!” said Madame Mila, with wide-open eyes of absolute
amazement, “you talk as if you were one of the angry husbands in a comedy
of Feuillet or Dumas! I don’t think you know anything about it at all;
how should you? You only admire yourself, and like art and all that kind
of thing, and are as cold as ice to everybody. ‘À la place du cœur, vous
n’avez qu’un caillou;’ I’ve read that somewhere.”

“‘Elle n’a qu’un écusson,’” corrected Lady Hilda, her serenity returning.
“If Hugo had known much about women, he would have said, ‘qu’un chiffon;’
but perhaps a dissyllable wouldn’t have scanned——”

“You never will convince me,” continued Madame de Caviare, “that you
would not be a happier woman if you had what you call senses and the rest
of it. One can’t live without sensations and emotions of some sort. You
never feel any except before a bit of Kronenthal china or a triptych of
some old fogy of a painter. You do care awfully about your horses, to be
sure; but then, as you don’t bet on anything, I don’t see what excitement
you can get out of them. You won’t play,—which is the best thing to take
to of all, because it will last; the older they grow the wilder women get
about it; look at the Grand Duchesse Seraphine,—over eighty,—as keen as
a ferret over her winnings, and as fierce as a tom-cat over her losses.
Now, that is a thing that can’t hurt any one, let you say what you like,
everybody plays,—why won’t you? If you lost half your income in one
night, it wouldn’t ruin you; and you have no idea how delicious it is to
get dizzy over the cards; you know one bets even at poker to any amount——”

“Thanks; it won’t tempt me,” answered Lady Hilda. “I have played at
Baden, to see if it would amuse me, and it didn’t amuse me in the
least,—no more than M. des Gommeux does! My dearest Mila, I am sure that
you people who do excite yourselves over baccarat and poker, and can feel
really flattered at having a Maurice always in attendance, and can divert
yourselves with oyster suppers and masked balls and cotillon riots,
are the happy women of this world,—that I quite grant you: oysters and
Maurices and cotillon and poker are so very easy to be got——”

“And men like women who like them!”

“That I grant too; poker and cotillons don’t exact any very fine
manners, and men nowadays always like to be, metaphorically, in their
smoking-coats. Only, you see, we are not always all constituted of the
same fortunate disposition: poker and cotillons only bore me. You should
think it my misfortune, not my fault. I am sure it must be charming
to drink a quantity of champagne, and whirl round like a South-Sea
islander, and play pranks that pass in a palace though the police would
interfere in a dancing-garden, and be found by the sun drinking soup at
a supper-table; I am sure it must be quite delightful. Only, you see, it
doesn’t amuse me,—no more than scrambling among a pack of cards flung on
their faces, which you say is delightful too, or keeping a Maurice in
your pocket, like your cigar-case and your handkerchief, which you say
is most delightful of all. But good-by, my dear; we shall quarrel if
we talk much longer like this; and we must not quarrel till to-morrow
morning, because your Dissimulée dress will look nothing without my
Austrasienne one. What time shall I call for you? Make it as late as you
can. I shall only just show myself.”

“Three o’clock, then,—that is quite early enough,” muttered Madame
Mila, somewhat sulkily; but she had teased and prayed her cousin into
accompanying her, in Louis Seize costumes most carefully compiled by
Worth from engravings and pictures of the period, to the Trasimene
costume ball, and would not fall out with her just on the eve of it,
because she knew their entrance would be _the_ effect of the night.

“Say half-past,” answered the Lady Hilda, as she closed the door and went
into her own rooms on the opposite side of the staircase.

“I really begin to think she is jealous of Maurice and in love with him,”
thought Madame Mila, in whose eyes Maurice was irresistible, though,
with the peculiar opticism of ladies in her position, she was perfectly
certain that he was adamant also to all save herself. And the idea of
her fastidious cousin’s hopeless passion so tickled her fancy that she
laughed herself into a good humor as her maids disrobed her; and she
curled herself up in her bed to get a good night’s sleep out before
donning the Dissimulée costume for the Trasimene ball, so that she should
go at half-past three “as fresh as paint,” in the most literal sense of
the word, to all the joyous rioting of the cotillon which Maurice was to
lead.

“You shine upon us late, madame,” said Della Rocca, advancing to meet
Lady Hilda, when they reached, at four o’clock in the morning, the vast
and lofty rooms glittering with fancy dresses.

“I only came at all to please Mila, and she only comes for the cotillon,”
she answered him; and she thought how well he looked as she glanced at
him. He wore a white Louis Treize mousquetaire dress, and he had the
collar of the Golden Fleece about his throat, for, among his many useless
titles and barren dignities, he was, like many an Italian noble, also a
grandee of Spain.

“You do not dance, madame?” he asked.

“Very seldom,” she answered, as she accepted his arm to move through
the rooms. “When mediæval dresses came in, dancing should have been
banished. Who could dance well in a long close-clinging robe tightly tied
back and heavy with gold thread and bullion fringes? They should revive
the minuet: we might go through that without being ridiculous. But if
they _will_ have the cotillon instead, they should dress like the girls
in Offenbach’s pieces, as many of them happen to be to-night. I do not
object to a mixture of epochs in furniture, but romping in a Renaissance
skirt!—that is really almost blasphemy enough to raise the ghost of
Titian!”

“I am afraid Madama Pampinêt and the Fiammina must have romped
sometimes,” said Della Rocca, with a smile. “But then you will say the
Decadence had already cast its shadow before it.”

“Yes; but there never was an age so vulgar as our own,” said the Lady
Hilda. “That I am positive of;—look, even peasants are vulgar now: they
wear tall hats and tawdry bonnets on Sundays; and, as for our society,
it is ‘rowdy:’ there is no other word for it, if you understand what that
means.”

“Canaille?”

“Yes, canaille. M. de St. Louis says the ‘femme comme il faut’ of his
youth is extinct as the dodo: language is slang, society is a mob, dress
is display, amusement is riot, people are let into society who have no
other claim to be there but money and impudence, and are as ignorant as
our maids and our grooms, and more so. It is all as bad as it can be, and
I suppose it will only go on getting worse. You Italians are the only
people with whom manner is not a lost art.”

“You do us much honor. Perhaps we too shall be infected before long.
We are sending our lads to public schools in your country: they will
probably come back unable to bow, ashamed of natural grace, and ambitious
to emulate the groom model in everything. This is thought an advanced
education.”

Lady Hilda laughed.

“The rich Egyptians go to English universities, and take back to the Nile
a passion for rat-hunting and brandy, and the most hideous hats and coats
in the universe, and then think they have improved on the age of the
Pharaohs. I hope Italy will never be infected, but I’m afraid; you have
gas-works, tramways, and mixed marriages, and your populace has almost
entirely abandoned costume.”

“And in the cities we have lost the instinct of good taste in the most
fatal manner. Perhaps it has died out with the old costumes. Who knows?
Dress is, after all, the thermometer of taste. Modern male attire is of
all others the most frightful, the most grotesque, the most gloomy, and,
to our climate, the most unsuitable.”

“Yes. Tall hats and tail-coats appear to me to be like the locusts:
wherever they spread they bear barrenness in their train. But the temper
of your people will always procure to you some natural grace, some
natural elegance.”

“Let us hope so; but in all public works our taste already is gone. One
may say, without vanity, that in full sense of beauty and of proportion
Italy surpassed of old all the world: how is it, I often ask myself,
that we have lost all this? Here in Floralia if we require gas-works
we erect their chimneys on the very bank of our river, ruining one of
the loveliest views in the world, and one that has been a tradition of
beauty for ages. If it be deemed necessary to break down and widen our
picturesque old bridges, we render them hideous as any railway road,
by hedging them with frightful monotonous parapets of cast iron, the
heaviest, most soulless, most hateful thing that is manufactured. Do we
make a fine hill-drive, costing us enormously, when we have no money
to pay for it, we make one, indeed, as fine as any in Europe; and,
having made it, then we ruin it by planting at every step cafés, and
guinguettes, and guard-houses, and every artificial abomination and
vulgarity in stucco and brick-work that can render its noble scenery
ridiculous. Do we deem it advisable, for sanitary or other purposes, to
turn the people out of the ancient market where they keep their stalls
under the old palace-walls happily enough, summer and winter, like so
many Dutch pictures, we build a cage of iron and glass like an enormous
cucumber-frame, inexpressibly hideous, and equally incommodious, and only
adapted to grill the people in June and turn them to ice in January. What
is the reason? We have liberal givers, such as your countryman Sloane,
such as my countryman Galliera, yet what single modern thing worth
producing can we show? We have destroyed much that will be as irreparable
a loss to future generations as the art destroyed in the great siege is
to us. But we have produced nothing save deformity. Perhaps, indeed,
we might not have any second Michael Angelo to answer if we called on
him; but it is certain that we must have architects capable of devising
something in carven stone to edge a bridge; we must have artists who,
were they consulted, would say, ‘Do not insult a sublime panorama of
the most poetic and celebrated valley in the world by putting into the
foreground a square guards’ box, a stucco drinking-house, and the gilded
lamps of a dancing-garden.’ We must have men capable of so much as that:
yet they are either never employed or never listened to; the truth,
I fear, is that a public work nowadays with us is like a plant being
carried to be planted in a city square, of which every one who passes it
plucks off a leaf: by the time it reaches its destination the plant is
leafless. The public work is the plant, and the money to be got from it
is the foliage; provided each one plucks as much foliage as he can, no
one cares in what state the plant reaches the piazza.”

Lady Hilda looked at him as he spoke with an eloquence and earnestness
which absorbed him for the moment, so that he forgot that he was talking
to a woman, and a woman whose whole life was one of trifling, of
languor, and of extravagance.

“All that is very true,” she said, with some hesitation; “but why then do
you hold yourself aloof?—why do you do nothing to change this state of
public things? You see the evil, but you prescribe no remedy.”

“The only remedy will be Time,” he answered her. “Corruption has eaten
too deeply into the heart of this nation to be easily eradicated. The
knife of war has not cut it out; we can only hope for what the medicines
of education and of open discussion may do; the greatest danger lies in
the inertia of the people; they are angry often, but they do not move——”

“Neither do you move, though you are angry.”

He smiled a little sadly.

“If I were a rich man I would do so. Poor as I am, I could not embrace
public life without seeming to seek my own private ends from office.
A man without wealth has no influence, and his motives will always be
suspected,—at least here.”

“But one should be above suspicion——”

“Were one certain to do good,—yes.”

“But why should you despair? You have a country of boundless resources, a
people affectionate, impressionable, infinitely engaging, and much more
intelligent naturally than any other populace, a soil that scarce needs
touching to yield the richest abundance, and in nearly every small town
or obscure city some legacy of art or architecture, such as no other land
can show——”

“Despair! God forbid that I should despair. I think there is infinite
hope; but I cannot disguise from myself that there are infinite dangers
also. An uneducated peasantry has had its religion torn away from it, and
has no other moral landmark set to cling to; old ways and old venerations
are kicked away, and nothing substituted; public business means almost
universally public pillage; the new text placed before the regenerated
nation is, ‘Make money, honestly if you can—but make money!’ haste,
avarice, accumulation, cunning, neglect of all loveliness, desecration
of all ancientness,—these, the modern curses which accompany ‘progress,’
are set before a scarcely awakened people as the proper objects and idols
of their efforts. We, who are chiefly to be moved by our affections and
our imaginations, are only bidden to be henceforth inspired by a joyless
prosperity and a loveless materialism. We, the heirs of the godhead of
the Arts, are only counseled to emulate the mechanical inventions and the
unscrupulous commerce of the American genius, and are ordered to learn
to blush with shame because our ancient cities, sacred with the ashes
of heroes, are not spurious brand-new lath-and-plaster human ant-hills
of the growth of yesterday!——Forgive me, madame,” he said, interrupting
himself, with a little laugh; “I forget that I am tedious to you. With
the taxes at fifty-two per cent., a poor land-owner like myself may
incline to think that all is not as well as it should be.”

“You interest me,” said the Lady Hilda, and her eyes dwelt on him with
a grave, musing regard that they had till then given to no man. “And on
your own lands, with your own people,—how is it there?”

His face brightened.

“My people love me,” he said, softly. “As for the lands,—when one is
poor, one cannot do much; but every one is content on them: that is
something.”

“Is it not everything?” said the Lady Hilda, with a little sigh; for she
herself, who could gratify her every wish, had never yet quite known
what content could mean. “Let us go and look at the ball-room; Mila will
be coming to know if we have heard of MacMahon’s death, that we talk so
seriously.”

She floated on his arm to the scene of tumult, where, being hemmed in
by lookers-on till the pressure left them scarcely any space to perform
upon, the dancers were going through a quadrille with exceeding vivacity,
and with strong reminiscences in it of some steps of the cancan, Madame
Mila and Lady Featherleigh particularly distinguishing themselves by
their imitations of the Chimpanzee dance, as performed in the last
winter’s operetta of Ching-aring-aring-ching.

They were of course being watched and applauded very loudly by
the ring of spectators as if they were really the actors in the
Ching-aring-aring-ching, which afforded them the liveliest pleasure
possible, great ladies being never so happy nowadays as when they are
quite sure that they might really be taken for comedians or courtesans.

It was hard upon Madame Mila that just as she had jumped so high that
La Petite Boulette herself could scarcely have jumped higher, the
lookers-on turned their heads to see the Lady Hilda in the door-way on
the arm of her white mousquetaire. Lady Hilda was beyond all dispute the
most beautiful woman of the rooms, she threw them all into the shade as
a crown diamond throws stars of strass; and many of the men were so
dazzled by her appearance there that they actually lost the sight of
Madame Mila’s rose-colored stockings twinkling in the air.

“Paolo fait bonne fortune,” they said to one another, and began to make
wagers that she would marry him, or, on the other hand, that she was only
playing with him: opinion varied, and bets ran high.

Society bets on everything; peace and love, and honor and happiness, are
only “staying” horses or “non-stayers,” on whose running the money is
piled. It is fortunate indeed and rare when the betting is “honest,” and
if the drinking-waters of peace be not poisoned on purpose, or the smooth
turf of a favorite’s career be not sprinkled with glass, by those who
have laid the odds heavily against it. So that they land their bets, what
do they care whether or not the subject of their speculations be lamed
for life and destined to drag out its weary days between the cab-shafts
till the end comes in the knacker’s yard?

As for the Lady Hilda, she was so used to be the observed of all
observers wherever she went, that she never heeded who looked at her,
and never troubled herself what anybody might say. She walked about with
Della Rocca, talked with him, and let him sit by her in little sheltered
camellia-filled velvet-hung nooks, because it pleased her, and because he
looked like an old Velasquez picture in that white Louis Treize dress.
Of what anybody might think she was absolutely indifferent; she was
not mistress of herself and of thirty thousand a year to care for the
tittle-tattle of a small winter city.

It was very pleasant to be mistress of herself,—to do absolutely as she
chose,—to have no earthly creature to consult,—to go to bed in Paris and
wake up in St. Petersburg if the fancy took her,—to buy big diamonds
till she could outblaze Lady Dudley,—to buy thoroughbred horses and
old pictures and costly porcelains and all sorts of biblots, ancient
and curious, that might please her taste,—to obey every caprice of the
moment and to have no one to be responsible to for its indulgence,—to
write a check for a large amount if she saw any great distress that was
painful to look upon,—to adorn her various houses with all that elegance
of whim and culture of mind could gather together from the treasures of
centuries,—to do just as she pleased, in a word, without any one else to
ask, or any necessity to ponder whether the expense were wise. It was
very agreeable to be mistress of herself; and yet——

There is a capitalist in Europe who is very unhappy because all his
wealth cannot purchase the world-famous key of the Strozzi princes.

Lady Hilda was never unhappy, but she was not quite content.

Out of the very abundance of her life she was weary, and there was a
certain coldness in it all; it was too like one of her own diamonds.

She sighed a little to-night when her white mousquetaire had led her to
her carriage, and she was rolling across the bridge homeward, whilst
Madame Mila’s gossamer skirts were still twirling and her rosy stockings
still twinkling in all the intricacies and diversions with which the
Vicomte Maurice would keep the cotillon going until nine o’clock in the
morning.

In the darkness of her carriage, as it went over the stones through the
winding ill-lit streets, she saw soft amorous eyes looking at her under
their dreamy lids. She could not forget their look; she was haunted by
it,—it had said so much.

The tale it had told was one she had heard at least twenty times a year
for ten long years, and it had never moved her; it had bored her,—nothing
more.

But now a sudden warmth, a strange emotion, thrilled in her, driving
through the dark with the pressure of his hand still seeming to linger
upon hers.

It was such an old old tale that his eyes had told, and yet for once it
had touched her somehow, and made her heart quicken, her color rise.

“It is too ridiculous!” she said to herself. “I am dreaming. Fancy _my_
caring!”

And she was angry with herself, and, when she reached her own rooms,
looked a moment at her full reflection in the long mirrors, diamonds and
all, before she rang for her maid to come to her.

It was a brilliant and beautiful figure that she saw there in the
gorgeous colors copied from a picture by Watteau le Jeune, and with the
great stones shining above her head and on her breast like so many little
dazzling suns.

She had loved herself very dearly all her life, lived for herself, and in
a refined and lofty way had been as absolutely self-engrossed and amorous
of her own pleasure and her own vanities as the greediest and cruelest of
ordinary egotists.

“Am I a fool?” she said, angrily, to her own image. “It is too absurd!
Why should he move me more than any one of all the others?”

And yet suddenly all the life which had so well satisfied her seemed
empty,—seemed cold and hard as one of her many diamonds.

She rang with haste and impatience for her maid, and all they did, from
the hot soup they brought to the way they untwisted her hair, was wrong,
and when she lay down in her bed she could not sleep, and when the bright
forenoon came, full of the sound of pealing bells and gay street songs
and hurrying feet, she fell into feverish dreams, and, waking later, did
not know what ailed her.

From that time Della Rocca ceased to avoid the Hôtel Murat; he was
received there oftener than on her “day;” he went about with her on
various pilgrimages to quaint old out-of-the-way nooks of forgotten art
which he could tell her of, knowing every nook and corner of his native
city; she almost always invited him when she had other people to dine
with her; her cousin did the same, and he was usually included in all
those manifold schemes for diversion which, woman-like, Madame Mila was
always setting on foot, thinking with Diderot’s vagabond that it is
something at any rate to have got rid of Time.

Sometimes he availed himself of those opportunities of Fortune, sometimes
he did not. His conduct had a variableness about it which did more than
anything else would have done to arrest the attention of a woman sated
with homage as the Lady Hilda had been all her days. She missed him when
he was absent; she was influenced by him when he was present. Beneath the
softness of his manner there was a certain seriousness which had its
weight with her. He made her feel ashamed of many things.

Something in his way of life also attracted her. There are a freedom
and simplicity in all the habits of an Italian noble that are in strong
contrast with the formal conventionalism of the ways of other men;
there is a feudal affectionateness of relation between him and his
dependants which is not like anything else; when he knows anything of
agriculture, and interests himself personally in his people, the result
is an existence which makes the life of the Paris flâneurs and the London
idlers look very poor indeed.

Palestrina often saw its lord drive thither by six in the morning,
walk over his fields, hear grievances and redress them, mark out new
vine-walks with his bailiff, watch his white oxen turn the sods of the
steep slopes, and plan trench-cuttings to arrest the winter-swollen
brooks, long before the men of his degree in Paris or in London opened
their heavy eyes to call for their morning taste of brandy, and awoke
to the recollection of their night’s gaming losses, or their wagers on
coming races.

The finest of fine gentlemen, the grandest of grand seigneurs, in court
or drawing-room or diplomatic circle, Paolo della Rocca, among his own
gray olive orchards and the fragrance of his great wooden storehouses,
was as simple as Cincinnatus, laughed like a boy with his old steward,
caressed like a woman the broad heads of his beasts at the plow, and sat
under a great mulberry to break his bread at noonday, hearkening to the
talk of his peasants as though he were one of them.

The old Etrurian gentleness and love of the rural life are still alive
in this land; may they never perish, for they are to the nation as the
timely rains to the vine, as the sweet strong sun to the harvest.

This simplicity, this naturalness, which in the Italian will often
underlie the highest polish of culture and of ceremony, had a curious
fascination for a woman in whose own life there had been no place for
simplicity and no thought for nature.

She had been in the bonds of the world always, as a child in its
swaddling bands,—none the less so because she had been one of its leaders
in those matters of supreme fashion wherein she had reigned as a goddess.
Her life had been altogether artificial; she had always been a great
garden lily in a hothouse, she had never known what it was to be blown
by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The
hothouse shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see
no horizon from it; that alone is the joy of the moorland. Now and then,
garden lily in a stove-heated palace though she was, some vague want,
some dim unfulfilled wish, had stirred in her; she began to think now
that it had been for that unknown horizon.

“Men live too much in herds, in crowded rooms, among stoves and
gas-jets,” he said to her once. “There are only two atmospheres that do
one morally any good,—the open air and the air of the cloister.”

“You mean that there are only two things that are good,—activity and
meditation?”

“I think so. The fault of society is that it substitutes, for those,
stimulants and stagnation.”

He made her think; he influenced her more than she knew. Under the
caressing subserviency to her as of a courtier, she felt the power of a
man who discerned life more clearly and more wisely than herself.

The chief evil of society lies in the enormous importance which it gives
to trifles. She began to feel that with all her splendor she had been
only occupied with trifles. Nature had been a sealed book to her, and she
began to doubt that she had even understood Art.

“If you can be pleased with this,” says a great art-critic, “this” being
a little fresco of St. Anne, “you can see Floralia. But if not,—by all
means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like;
you can never see it.”

The test may be a little exaggerated, but the general meaning of his
words is correct.

Cosmopolitan and Anglo-American Floralia, for the main part, do not see
the city they come to winter in; see nothing of its glories, of its
sanctities, of its almost divinities; see only their own friends, their
own faces, their own fans, flirtations, and fallals, reflected as in
mirrors all around them, and filling up their horizon.

“A Dutchman can be just as solemnly and entirely contemplative of a
lemon-pip and a cheese-paring as an Italian of the Virgin in glory.”

Cosmopolitan and Anglo-American Floralia is in love with its lemon-pips,
and has no eyes for the Glory. When it has an eye, indeed, it is almost
worse, because it is bent then on buying the Glory for its drawing-room
staircase, or, worse yet, on selling it again at a profit.

The Lady Hilda, who did not love lemon-pips, but who yet had never seen
the Glory with that simplicity, as of a child’s worship, which alone
constitutes the true sight, began to unlearn many of her theories, and
to learn very much in emotion and vision, as she carried her delicate
disdainful head into the little dusky chapels and the quiet prayer-worn
chantries of Floralia.

Her love of Art had, after all, been a cold, she began to think a poor,
passion. She had studied the philosophy of Art, had been learned in
the contemplative and the dramatic schools, had known the signs manual
of this epoch and the other, had discoursed learnedly of Lombard and
Byzantine, of objective and subjective, of archaic and naturalistic; but
all the while it had been not very much more than a scholarly jargon, a
graceful pedantry, which had seemed to make her doubly scornful of those
more ignorant. Art is a fashion in some circles, as religion is in some,
and license is in others, and Art had been scarcely deeper than a fashion
with her, or cared for more deeply than as a superior kind of furniture.

But here, in this the sweetest, noblest, most hallowed city of the world,
which has been so full of genius in other times that the fragrance
thereof remains, as it were, upon the very stones, like that Persian
attar, to make one ounce of which a hundred thousand roses die, here
something much deeper yet much simpler came upon her.

Her theories melted away into pure reverence, her philosophies faded
into tenderness, new revelations of human life came to her, before
those spiritual imaginings of men to whom the blue sky had seemed full
of angels, and the watches of the night been stirred by the voice of
God: before those old panels and old frescoes, often so simple, often
so pathetic, always so sincere in faith and in work, she grew herself
simpler and of more humility, and learned that Art is a religion for
whose right understanding one must needs become “even as a little child.”

She had been in great art cities before,—in the home of Tintoretto and
the Veronese, in the asylum of the Madonna de San Sisto, in the stone
wilderness of Ludwig where the Faun sleeps in exile, in mighty Rome
itself; but she had not felt as she felt now. She had been full of
appreciation of their art, but they had left her as they had found her,
cold, vain, self-engrossed, entirely shut in a holy of holies of culture
and of criticism; she had covered her Cavalcaselle with pencil-notes, and
had glanced from a predella or a pietà to the pages of her Ruskin with a
serene smile of doubt.

But here and now Art ceased to be science, and became emotion in her. Why
was it? She did not care to ask herself.

Only all her old philosophies seemed falling about her like shed leaves,
and her old self seemed to her but a purposeless, frivolous, chilly
creature. The real reason she would not face, and indeed as yet was not
conscious of; the reason that love had entered into her, and that love,
if it be worth the name, has always two handmaidens, swift sympathy, and
sad humility, keeping step together.




CHAPTER VII.


Foreign Floralia, _i.e._, that portion of Floralia which is not
indigenous to the soil, but has only flown south with the swallows,
is remarkable for a really godlike consciousness: it knows everything
about everybody, and all things, past, present, and to come, that ever
did, could, would, should, cannot, will not, or never shall happen; and
is aware of all things that have ever taken place, and of a great many
things that never have done so. It is much better informed about you
than you are yourself; knows your morals better than your confessor,
your constitution better than your doctor, your income better than
your banker, and the day you were born on better than your mother. It
is omniscient and omnipresent, microscopic and telescopic; it is a
court-edition of Scotland Yard, and a pocket-edition of the Cabinet Noir;
it speeds as many interrogations as a telegraph-wire, and has as many
mysteries as the agony column of a newspaper: only it always answers its
own questions, and has all the keys to its own mysteries, and, what is
still more comforting, always knows everything for “certain.”

It knows that you starve your servants because you are poor and like to
save on the butcher and baker; it knows that you overpay them because
you are rich and want them to keep your secrets; it knows that your
great-grandmother’s second cousin was hanged for forgery at Tyburn;
it knows that your silk stockings have cotton tops to them; it knows
that your heirloom guipure is imitation, made the other day at Rapallo;
it knows that your Embassy only receives you because—hush!—a great
personage—ah, so very shocking; it knows that you had green peas six
weeks before anybody else; it knows that you have had four dinner-parties
this week and are living on your capital; it knows that when you were
in Rome you only went to the Quirinal Wednesdays, because (_whisper,
whisper, whisper_)—oh, indeed it is perfectly true,—had it on the best
authority,—dreadful, incredible, but perfectly true.

In point of fact, there is nothing it does not know.

Except, to be sure, it never knows that Mrs. Potiphar is not virtuous, or
that Lady Messalina is not everything she should be; this it never knows
and never admits, because if it did it could not very well drink the
Potiphar champagne, and might lose for its daughters the Messalina balls.
Indeed, its perpetual loquacity, which is “as the waters come down at
Lodore,” has most solemn and impressive interludes of refreshing dumbness
and deafness when any incautious speaker, not trained to its ways, hints
that Mrs. Potiphar lives in a queer manner, or that Lady Messalina would
be out of society anywhere else; then indeed does Anglo-Saxon Floralia
draw itself up with an injured dignity, and rebuke you with the murmur
of—Christian charity.

In other respects, however, it has the soul of Samuel Pepys multiplied by
five thousand. It watched the progress of intimacy between Lady Hilda and
the ruined lord of Palestrina, and knew “all about it,”—knew a vast deal
more than the persons concerned, of course; it always does, or what would
be the use of talking?

Gossiping over its bonbons and tea in the many pleasant houses in which
the south-wintering northern swallows nestle, it knew that he and she had
been in love years and years before; the family would not let her marry
him because he was so poor; it was the discovery of his letters to her
that had killed poor old rich Vararlberg; he and her brother had fought
in the Bois,—indeed!—oh, yes, it was hushed up at the time, but it was
quite true, and he had shot her brother in the shoulder; the surgeon who
had attended the wounded man had told the physician who had attended
the sister-in-law of the cousin of the most intimate friend of the lady
who had vouched for this. There could not be better authority. But
there never was anything against her?—oh, dear me, no, never anything;
everybody said this very warmly, because everybody had been, hoped to be,
or at least would not despair of being, introduced to her and asked to
dinner. It was very romantic, really most interesting; they had not met
for nine years, and now!—ah, that explained all her coldness then, and
that extraordinary rejection of the Crown Prince of Deutschland, which
nobody ever had been able to understand. But was it not strange that he
had never tried to resume his old influence before? No; he was as proud
as he was poor, and, besides, they had quarreled after the duel with
her brother; they had parted one night very bitterly, after one of the
Empress’s balls at St. Cloud, out on the terrace there; but he had always
refused to give up her portrait; somebody had seen it upon his chest
when he had been stripped in the hospital after Custozza. Oh, yes, they
remembered that perfectly.

Altogether they made such a very pretty story that it was quite a pity
that it was not true, and that the subjects of it had never met until
the Duc de St. Louis had brought them face to face that winter. The one
real truth which did begin to embitter the life of the Lady Hilda and
lie heavy on her thoughts waking and sleeping was one that the garrulous
gossiping Pepys-like northern swallows, chirping so busily, did not guess
at all. Indeed, this is a sad fate which generally befalls gossip.

It is like the poor devil in the legend of Fugger’s Teuffelpalast at
Trent: it toils till cock-crow picking up the widely-scattered grains of
corn by millions till the bushel measure is piled high, and, lo! the five
grains that are _the_ grains always escape its sight and roll away and
hide themselves. The poor devil, being a primitive creature, shrieked and
flew away in despair at his failure. Gossip hugs its false measure and
says loftily that the five grains are of no consequence whatever.

The Duc de St. Louis, who had not got the five grains any more than they
had, yet who could have told them their bushelful was all wrong, like
a wise man, seeing the project of his affections in a fair way towards
realization,—at least, so he thought,—prudently abstained from saying one
word about it to any one. “Trop de zèle” spoiled everything, he knew,
from politics to omelettes, from the making of proselytes to the frying
of artichokes. A breath too much has before now toppled down the most
carefully built house of cards. When to let things alone is perhaps the
subtlest, rarest, and most useful of all knowledge.

A man here and there has it; it may be said that no woman has, has had,
or ever will have it. If Napoleon had had it he might have died at eighty
at St. Cloud instead of St. Helena. But genius, like woman, never has
been known to have it. For genius and caution are as far apart as the
poles.

“Tout va bien,” the Duc said to himself, taking off his hat to her when
he saw Della Rocca by her carriage, meeting them in discussion before
some painting or statue that she was about to buy, or watching them
_tête-à-tête_ on some couch of a ball-room, or in some nook of a gas-lit
grove of camellias.

“Tout va bien,” said the Duc, smiling to himself, and speeding on his way
to his various missions, reconciling angry ladies, making the prettiest
flatteries to pretty ones, seeking some unobtainable enamel, ivory,
or Elzevir, penning sparkling proverbs in verse, arranging costume
quadrilles, preventing duels and smiling on débutantes, adjusting old
quarrels and hearing new tenors; always in a whirl of engagements, always
courted and courteous, always the busiest, the wittiest, the happiest,
the most urbane, the most charming, the most serene person in all
Floralia. “Tout va bien,” said the Duc, and the town with him: the two
persons concerned were neither of them quite so sure.

Meanwhile, for a little space the name and fame and ways and wonders of
the Lady Hilda, which filled Floralia with a blaze as of electric lights,
quelling all lesser luminaries, were almost disregarded in a colossal
sentiment, a gigantic discussion, a debate which, for endless eloquence
and breathless conflict, would require the dithyrambs of Pindar meetly
to record,—the grave question of who would, and who would not, go to the
Postiche ball.

“Number One goes to dine with Number Two, only that he may say he did so
to Number Three,” some cynic has declared; but Floralia improves even on
this; before it goes to dine or dance, it spends the whole week in trying
to find out who all the Number Fours will be, or in declaring that if
such and such a Number Four goes it does not think it can go itself,—out
of principle; all which diversions while its time away and serve to amuse
it as a box of toys a child. Not that it ever fails to go and dine or
dance,—only it likes to discuss it dubiously in this way.

The Postiche ball was really a thing to move society to its depths.

The wintering-swallows had never been so fluttered about anything since
the mighty and immortal question of the previous season, when a Prince
of the Holy Roman Empire, a United Netherlands Minister, and a Duc
et Pair of France, had all been asked to dinner together with their
respective wives at an American house, and the hostess and all the
swallows with her had lived in agonies for ten days previously, torn to
pieces by the terrible doubts of Precedence; beseeching and receiving
countless counsels and counselors, and consulting authorities and quoting
precedents with the research of Max Müller and the zeal of Dr. Kenealy.

But the Postiche ball was a much wider, indeed almost an international
matter; because the Anglo-Saxon races had staked their lives that it
should be a success; and the Latin and Muscovite had declared that it
would be a failure; and everybody was dying to go, and yet everybody was
ashamed to go; a state of mind which constitutes the highest sort of
social ecstasy in this age of composite emotions.

Mr. and Mrs. Joshua R. Postiche, some said, were Jews, and some said
were Dutch, and some said were half-castes from Cuba, and some said
were Americans from Arkansas, and some said had been usurers, and some
gin-sellers, and some opium-dealers, and some things even yet worse;
at any rate they had amassed a great deal of money, and had therefore
got into society by dint of a very large expenditure and the meekest
endurance of insults; and had made an ancient palace as gaudy and garish
as any brand-new hotel at Nice or Scarborough, and gathered in it all the
cosmopolitan crowd of Floralia; some of the Italian planets and Muscovite
stars alone hanging aloof in a loftier atmosphere, to the very great
anguish of the Joshua R. Postiches.

The ball was to be a wonderful ball, and the cotillon presents were
whispered to have cost thirty thousand francs, and there were various
rumors of a “surprise” there would be at it, as poor Louis Napoleon used
to promise the Parisians one for the New Year. Louis Napoleon’s promises
always ended in smoke, but the surprise of the Joshua R. Postiches was
always to be reckoned on as something excellent:—salmon come straight
from the Scotch rivers; lobsters stewed in tokay du krone; French comic
actors fetched from Paris; some great singer, paid heaven knew what for
merely opening her mouth; some dove flying about with jewels in his beak
for everybody; or something of that sort, which showed that the Joshua R.
Postiches, wherever they had been “raised,” or even if they had kept a
drinking-bar and eating-shop in Havana, as some people said, were at all
events persons who knew the requirements of their own generation and the
way to mount into “La Haute.”

Why they wanted to get there no mortal could tell; they had no children,
and were both middle-aged; but no doubt, if you have not been used
to them, the cards of countesses are as balm in Gilead, and to see a
fashionable throng come up your staircase is to have attained the height
of human desire.

At any rate, the Joshua R. Postiches had set their souls on this sort of
social success, and they achieved it; receiving at their parties many
distinguished and infinitely bored personages who had nothing to do in
Floralia, and would have cut them in Paris, Vienna, or London with the
blandest and blankest stare of unconsciousness.

Madame Mila was on the point of adding herself to those personages.

“I _must_ go to the ball,” she said. “Oh, it will be the best thing of
the season except Nina Trasimene’s. I must go to the ball; but then I
can’t endure to know the woman.”

“Can’t you go without knowing her?” said the Lady Hilda. “That has been
done——”

Madame Mila did not feel the satire.

“Yes; one could do it in Paris or London; but not in a little place like
this,” she answered, innocently. “I must let them present her to me; and
I must leave a card. That is what’s so horrid. The woman is dreadful;
she murders all the languages; and the man’s always looking about for a
spittoon, and calls you my lady. They are too dreadful! But I must go to
the ball. Besides, our own people want Maurice to lead the cotillon. Now
Guido Salvareo is ill, there’s nobody that can come near Maurice——”

“But I suppose he would not dare to go if you were not there?”

“Of course he would not go; the idea! But I mean to go; I must go. I’m
only thinking how I can get out of knowing the woman afterwards. It’s
so difficult in a small place, and I am always so good-natured in those
things. I suppose it’s no use asking you to come, Hilda? else, if you
would, _you_ could cut them afterwards most deliciously, and I should do
as you did. Left to myself, I’m always too good-natured.”

“I would do most things to please you, my dear Mila,” answered her
cousin, “but I don’t think I can do that. You know it’s my rule never
to visit people that I won’t let visit me; and I don’t like murdered
languages, and being called ‘my lady.’”

“Oh, the people are horrid,—I say so,” answered the Comtesse. “I shall
have nothing to do with them, of course,—after their ball.”

“But surely it’s very low, Mila, that sort of thing. I know people do it
nowadays. But, really, to be a guest of a person you intend to cut next
day——”

“What does it matter? She wants my name on her list; she gets it; I’m not
bound to give her anything more. There is nothing unfair about it. She
has what she wants, and more than she could expect. Of course, all that
kind of persons must know perfectly well that we only go to them as we
go to the opera, and have no more to do with them than we have with the
opera door-keepers. Of course they know we don’t visit them as we visit
our own people But if snobbish creatures like those find pleasure in
entertaining us, though they know quite well what we think of them, and
how we esteem them, and why we go to them,—well, I don’t see that they
deserve anything better.”

“Nor I,” said the Lady Hilda. “Only I shouldn’t go to them; that’s all.
And it _is_ very funny, my love, that you, who have lived in all the
great courts of Europe, and have had your own embassy in London, should
care one straw for a ball at the Joshua R. Postiches’. Good gracious! You
must have seen about seventy thousand balls in your time!”

“I am only six years older than you, Hilda,” said she, tartly. “I suppose
you’ve been telling Della Rocca not to go to the Postiches’. Olga and
the Baroness and Madame Valkyria and scores of them have been trying to
persuade him all the week, because if he stay away so many of the other
men will; and none of us can stir him an inch about it. ‘On peut être de
très-braves gens,—mais je n’y vais pas,’ that is all he says; as if there
being ‘braves gens’ or not had anything to do with it; and yet I saw him
the other day with his hand on a contadino’s shoulder in the marketplace,
and he was calling him ‘carissimo mio.’”

“One of his own peasants, most likely,” said the Lady Hilda, coldly. “I
have never heard these Postiches even mentioned by M. Della Rocca, and I
certainly have nothing whatever to do with where he goes or doesn’t go.”

“He is always with you, at any rate,” said Madame Mila; “and if you would
make him go, it would only be kind of you. You see we want _everybody_ we
know, so that we may be sure to make the square dances only of our own
people, and not to see anything of anybody the Postiches may have asked
themselves. Little Dickie Dorrian, who’s managing it all, said to the
woman Postiche, ‘I’ll bring the English division if you’ll spend enough
on the cotillon toys; but I won’t undertake the Italians.’ Now, if Della
Rocca——”

“Would you want a new dress, Mila?” said the Lady Hilda; “I am sure you
must if you’re going to a woman you can’t know the next day.”

“I should like one, of course,” said the Comtesse, “but I’ve had thirty
new ones this season already—and what I owe Worth!—not to talk of the
Maison Roger——”

“Let me give you one,” said the Lady Hilda. “Worth will do anything at
short notice for either of us; and I must think this poor Postiche woman
ought to see you in a new dress, as she’s never to see you again.”

“You are a darling, Hilda!” said Madame Mila, with ardent effusion,
rising to kiss her cousin.

Lady Hilda turned to let the caress fall on the old guipure lace fichu
round her throat, and drew her writing-things to her to pen a telegram to
M. Worth.

“I suppose you don’t care to say what color?” she asked, as she wrote.

“Oh, no,” answered the Comtesse. “He remembers all the combinations I’ve
had much better than I do. You dictate to him a little too much; I’ve
heard him say so——”

“He never said so to me,” said the Lady Hilda, with a laugh. “Of course
I dictate to him. Whatever taste your dress-maker, man or woman, may
have,—and he has genius,—there are little touches which should always
come from oneself, and which can alone give originality. That is why
all that herd of women, who really do go to Worth but yet are nobodies,
look hardly the better for him; he thinks about us, and we think about
ourselves; but he doesn’t think about them, and, as they have no thoughts
themselves, the result is that they all look as conventional and similar
as if they were dolls dressed for a bazaar. Women ought to be educated to
more sense of color and form. Even an ugly woman ought to be taught that
it is her duty to make her ugliness as little disagreeable as possible.
If the eyes and the taste of women were cultivated by artistic study, an
ill-dressed woman would become an impossibility. If I were ever so poor,”
continued the Lady Hilda, impressively,—“if I were ever so poor, and had
to sew my own gowns, and make them of serge or of dimity, I would cut
them so that Giorgione or Gainsborough, if they were living, would be
able to look at me with complaisancy,—or at all events without a shudder.
It is not half so much a question of material as it is of taste. But
nowadays the people who cannot afford material have no taste; so that
after us, and the women whom Worth manages to make look decently in spite
of themselves, there is nothing but a multitude of hideously-attired
persons, who make the very streets appalling either by dreariness or
gaudiness:—they never have any medium. Now, a peasant-girl of the Marche,
or of the Agro Romana, or of the Pays de Vaud, is charming, because her
garments have beauty of hue in them, and that other beauty which comes
from perfect suitability and—— ah! come sta, Duca?”

She interrupted herself, and turned to Della Rocca, who was standing
behind her, the servant’s announcement of him having been unheard: it was
her day to receive.

“Oh that the rest of your sex, madame,” he said, after his salutations
were made, “could sit at your feet and take in those words of wisdom!
Yes, I heard most that you said; I can understand your tongue a little;
you are so right; it is the duty of every woman to make herself as full
of grace as she can; all cannot be lovely, but none need be unlovely.”

“Exactly; women are reproached with thinking too much about dress, but
the real truth is, they do not think enough about it,—in the right way.
They talk about it dreadfully, in the vulgarest fashion, but bring any
thought to it they don’t. Most women will wear anything if it be only
_de rigueur_. I believe if I, and Princess Metternich, and Madame de
Gallifet, and Madame Aguado, and a few like us wore that pea-green silk
coat and waistcoat which the Advanced Thought Ladies of America are
advocating as the best new kind of dress for women, that you would see
ten thousand pea-green coats and waistcoats blazing in the streets the
week afterwards.”

“Not a bad idea for the Cotton Costume ball,” said Madame Mila. “I will
have a pea-green coat and waistcoat, a tall hat, and hessians, and call
myself ‘Advanced Thought.’”

“To be completely in character, Mila, you must have blue spectacles, a
penny whistle, a phial full of nostrums, a magpie for your emblem, and a
calico banner, inscribed ‘Everything is Nothing!’——”

“Charming! It shall be the best thing there. Draw it for me, Della Rocca,
and I will send the sketch to Paris, so that it can all come in a box
together, magpie and all.”

He drew a sheet of paper to him, and sketched the figure in ink, with
spirit.

“You have all the talents; so many thanks,” said Madame Mila, looking
over his shoulder.

Della Rocca sighed.

“If I have them I have buried them, madame;—but indeed I can make no such
claim.”

“So many thanks,” echoed the Comtesse. “Pray don’t say a word about it,
or we shall have a dozen ‘Advanced Thoughts’ in calico. Hilda, I am just
going to Nina’s to see about the _Muscadins_. I have resolved we shall
play that piece or no other. I shall be back in ten minutes; ask Olga to
wait.” And Madame Mila wafted herself out of the room, and down-stairs to
the court-yard, where the coupé and the exemplary Maurice were waiting.

“How she does amuse herself!” said Lady Hilda, a little enviously.
“I wish I could do it! What _can_ it matter whether they play the
_Muscadins_ or anything else?”

“Plus on est fou, plus on rit,” said Della Rocca, sketching arabesques
with his pen. “Nay, that is too impolite in me to charming Madame Mila.
But, like all old proverbs, it is more true than elegant.”

“Do you know, madame,” he continued, with a little hesitation, “I have
often ventured to think that, despite your brilliancy, and your position,
and all your enviable fate, you are not altogether—quite happy? Am I
right? Or have I committed too great an impertinence to be answered?”

“No impertinence whatever,” said the Lady Hilda, a little wearily. “You
may be right; I don’t know; I am not unhappy, certainly,—I have nothing
to be unhappy about; but—most things seem very stupid to me. I confess,
Mila’s endless diversions and excitements are quite beyond me. There is
such a terrible sameness in everything.”

“Because you have no deeper interests,” he answered her. He still sat
near her at her writing-table beside the fire, and was playing with the
little jeweled boy who held her pen-wiper.

She did not answer him; and he continued:

“I think you have said yourself, madame, the cause why everything seems
more or less wearisome to you: you have ‘nothing to be unhappy about;’
that is, you have no one for whom you care.”

He thought that her proud delicate face colored a little; or it might be
the warmth from the fire of oak-logs and pine-cones.

“No; I don’t care about people,” she answered him, indifferently. “When
you have seen a person a few times, it is enough. It is like a book you
have read through: the interest is gone; you know the _mot d’énigme_.”

“You speak of society; I spoke of affections.”

The Lady Hilda laughed a little.

“I can’t follow you. I do not feel them. I like Clairvaux, my brother,
certainly, but we go years without seeing each other quite contentedly.”

“I spoke of affections,—other affections,” replied Della Rocca, with a
little impatience. “There is nothing else that gives warmth or color to
life. Without them there is no glow in its pictures, they are all painted
_en grisaille_. Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has
any force or mind, any high intelligence. Society is, as you say, a book
we soon read through, and know by heart till it loses all interest. Art
alone cannot fill more than a certain part of our emotions; and culture,
however perfect, leaves us unsatisfied. There is only one thing that can
give to life what your poet called the light that never was on sea or
land,—and that is human love.”

His eyes rested on her; and for once in her life her own eyes fell; a
troubled softness came for a moment on her face, dispersing all its
languor and its coldness. In another moment she recovered herself, and
smiled a little.

“Ah! you are _appassionato_, as becomes your country.”

Della Rocca looked at her with something of disappointment and something
of distaste. He rose, and approached the grand piano.

“You allow me?” he said, and touched a few of the chords. He sang very
low, and almost as it were to himself, a canzone of the people:

    “Si tu mi lasci, lasciar non te voglio;
    Se m’ abbandoni, ti vo seguitare;
    Se passi il mare, il mar passare io voglio;
    Se giri il mondo, il mondo vo’ girare,” etc.[1]

The words were very simple, but the melody was passionate and beautiful;
his voice, so low at first, rose louder, with all the yearning tenderness
in it with which the song is laden; and the soft sounds echoed through
the silent room, as they had echoed ten thousand times in moonlit nights
of midsummer, over the land where Romeo and Stradella and Francesca loved.

His voice sank softly into silence; and Lady Hilda did not move.

There was a mist that was almost like tears in her proud eyes; she gazed
into the fire, with her cheek leaning on her hand; she did not speak to
him; there was no sound but the falling of some burning wood upon the
hearth.

“The simplest contadina in the land would understand that,” he said, as
he rose; “and you, great lady though you are, cannot? Madame, there are
things, after all, that you have missed.”

“Go back and sing again,” she said to him, taking no notice of his words;
“I did not know you ever sang——”

“Every Italian does,—or well or ill,” he answered her. “We are born with
music in us, like the birds.”

“But in society who hears you?”

“No one. An atmosphere of gas, candles, ennui, perfume, heat, and inane
flatteries! ah no, madame; music is meant for silence, moonlight,
vine-paths, summer nights——”

“This is winter and firelight, a few arm-chairs and a great deal of
street-noise; all the same, go back and sing me more.”

She spoke indifferently and lightly, leaning her hand back on her chair,
and hiding a little yawn with her hand; she would not have him see that
he had touched her to any foolish, momentary weakness. But he had seen.
He smiled a little.

“As you command,” he answered, and he went back and made her music as she
wished; short love-lyrics of the populace, sonnets set to noble airs,
wild mournful boat-songs, and snatches of soft melodies, such as echo all
the harvest-time through the firefly-lighted corn,—things all familiar to
him from his infancy, but to her unknown, and full of the force and the
yearning of the passion which was unknown to her also, and in a certain
way derided by her.

He broke off abruptly, and came and leaned on the chimney-piece near
her, with his arm among the little pug-dogs in Saxe, and figures and
fountains in Capo di Monte, which she had collected in a few weeks from
the bric-à-brac people. He did not speak; he only looked at her where she
sat, with the firelight and the dying daylight on the silver-fox furs
fringing her dress, on the repoussé gold and silver work of her loose
girdle, on the ends of the old Spanish lace about her throat, on the
great rings that sparkled on her white fingers, which were lying so idly
clasped together on her lap.

“You sing very beautifully,” she said, calmly, at length, with her eyes
half closed and her head lying back on the chair-cushions. “It is very
strange you should be so mute in society.”

“I never sang to a crowd in my life, and never would. Music is an
impulse, or it is nothing. I could never sing save to some woman who——”

He paused a moment.

“Who was music in herself,” he added, with a smile: it was not what had
been upon his lips.

“Then you should not have sung to me,” she said, still with half-closed
eyes and a careless coldness in her voice. “I am all discord; have you
not found that out?—every woman is, nowadays; we have lost the secret of
harmony; we are always wanting to be excited, and never succeeding in
being anything but bored.”

“These are mere words, madame,” he answered her. “I hope they are not
true. By discord I think you only mean inconsistency. Pardon me, but
I think you are all so wearied because of the monotony of your lives.
I dare say that sounds very strangely to you, because you pursue all
the pleasures and all the extravagances that are obtainable. But then
all these are no novelties, they are merely habits. Habit is nothing
better than a harness, even when it is one silvered and belled. You have
exhausted everything too early: how can it have flavor? You pursue an
unvarying routine of amusement: how can it amuse? The life of the great
world is, after all, when we once know it well, as tiresome as the life
of the peasant,—perhaps more so. I know both.”

“All that may be right enough,” said the Lady Hilda, “but there is no
help for it, that I see. If the world is not amusing, that is not our
fault. In the Beau Siècle, perhaps, or in Augustan Rome——”

“Be very sure it was the same thing. An artificial life must grow
tiresome to any one with a mind above that of a parrot or a monkey. If
we can be content with it, we deserve nothing better. What you call your
discord is nothing but your dissatisfaction,—the highest part of you. If
it were not treason to say so, treason against this exquisite apparel,
I would say that you would be more likely to know happiness were you
condemned to the serge and the dimity you spoke of to Madame Mila an hour
ago.”

He had sunk on a stool at her feet as he spoke, and caressed the silver
fox and the gold girdle lightly; his hand touched hers in passing, and
her face grew warm. She put a feather screen between her and the fire.

“That is the old argument of content in the cottage, etc.,” she said,
with a slight laugh. “I do not believe in it in the least. If it be
‘best repenting in a coach-and-six,’ it must be best to be bored in an
arm-chair——”

“Perhaps. It is not I, certainly, who should praise poverty,” he said,
with some bitterness, and more sadness; “and, indeed, poverty or riches
has little to do with the question of happiness; happiness can come but
from one thing——”

“A good conscience? How terribly moral you are!”

“No:—from our emotions, from our passions, from our sympathies; in fine,
from Love.”

His hand still played with the gold fringe of the girdle as he sat at
her feet; his eyes were lifted to her face; his voice was very low;
in all his attitude and action and regard there were an unuttered
solicitation, an eloquence of unspoken meaning; she was silent;—then the
door opened; he dropped the girdle, and rose to his feet; there came
a patter of high heels, and a chime of swift aristocratic voices; and
into the room there entered the Princess Olga, attended by her constant
shadow, Don Carlo Maremma, with Lady Featherleigh behind her, accompanied
by _her_ attendant, Prince Nicolas Doggendorff.

“Ma chère, there is a regular riot going on at Nina’s,” said the
Princess Olga, advancing with both hands outstretched. “All about those
_Muscadins_. Mila has seceded in full form, and, of course, M. des
Gommeux with her. Blanche will only play if they have ‘_Il faut qu’une
porte_,’ etc., which is as old as the hills, and Mila won’t play at all
if Blanche be allowed to play anything. They have quarreled for life; so
have Mila and Nina. They are slanging each other like two street-boys.
Alberto Rimini is on his knees between them, and the Duc is declaring for
the five thousandth time that it is the last he will ever have to do with
theatricals. I left while I could escape with life. What a pity it is
that playing for charity always develops such fierce hostilities! Well,
Paolo, have you thought better of the Postiche ball? No? How stiff-necked
you are! I do believe Carlo will be the only Italian there!”

“It will be a distinction to inscribe on his tombstone, madame,” said
Della Rocca. “But then he goes under command——”

“And under protest,” murmured Don Carlo.

“Which does not count. When one is no longer a free agent——”

Princess Olga hit him a little blow with her muff.

“But why should you not go to the Postiches’? Just as you go to the
Veglione; it is nothing more.”

“Madame, I am very old-fashioned in my ideas, I dare say, but I confess I
think that no one should accept as a host a person he would never accept
as his guest. I may be wrong——”

“Of course you are wrong. That is not the question at all,” said Princess
Olga, who did not like people to differ with her. “Joshua R. Postiche
will never dream of being asked to shoot your wild ducks or your
partridges. All he wants is that you should just be seen going up his
staircase and drinking his champagne. Society is full of Postiches,—low
people, with a craze for entertaining high people. They don’t care how we
insult them, nor how we laugh at them, provided our cards lie in the bowl
in their hall. We take them at their own valuation, and treat them as we
treat the waiters at Spillman’s or Doney’s: we have paid the bill with
our cards.”

“That is to say, we have paid with our names,—which should represent all
the honor, dignity, and self-respect that we have inherited, and are
bound to maintain, for our own sakes and for those who may come after us.”

“Oh, mon Dieu, quel grand sérieux!” cried the princess, impatiently.
“But, of course, if you’ve been sitting with Hilda you have got more
stiff-necked than ever. What do you say, Hilda? Isn’t it ill-natured of
him? He need only walk in, bow once to the woman, and look on at the
edge of the ball-room for twenty minutes. The other men will go if he
will do as much as that.”

“I think M. della Rocca quite right not ‘to do as much as that,’” said
the Lady Hilda. “Why Society ever does as much as that, or half as much,
or anything at all, for Joshua R. Postiche, I can never tell. As it does,
to be consistent everybody should dine with the fruit-woman from the
street-corner, and play écarté with their own chimney-sweeps.”

“Oh, we shall come to that, madame,” said Nicolas Doggendorff. “At least,
if chimney-sweeping ever makes heaps of money; I don’t think it does; it
only chokes little boys.”

“Ce bon Monsieur Postiche sold rum and molasses,” murmured Don Carlo.

“What’s it to us what he sold?” said Lady Featherleigh. “We’ve nothing to
do with him; we’re only going to his ball. You talk as if we asked the
man to dinner.”

“What does the Archduchess Anna always say: ‘Où je m’amuse, j’y vais.’
So we do all. I hear he has been put up for the Club: is it true?” said
Princess Olga to Carlo Maremma.

“Yes; Krunensberg has put him up,” he answered her; “but he shall never
get into it, while there are any of us alive.”

“Et s’il n’y a qu’un, moi je serai celui-la,” quoted Della Rocca.

“But he has lent Krunensberg heaven knows what,—some say two million
francs,” said Lady Featherleigh.

Prince Krunensberg was a great personage, and, for a foreigner, of great
influence in the Club.

“Chère dame,” said Della Rocca, “if we elect all Krunensberg’s creditors
we shall have to cover three streets with our club-house!”

“Oh, my dear! I am half dead!” cried Madame Mila, flashing into the room,
gorgeous in the feathers of the golden pheasant, arranged in the most
exquisite combination on violet satin and bronze velvet, and throwing
her muff on one side of her and her parasol on the other, while Maurice
des Gommeux, who was the most admirable of upper servants, stooped
for them and smoothed their ruffled elegance. “I am half dead! Such a
scene I never went through in my life,—I, who hate scenes, and never
have any hardly even with Spiridion! Oh, has Olga told you? Yes; it is
horrible, infamous, intolerable!—after all I have done for that odious
Dumb Asylum,—and my costumes ordered for the _Muscadins_, and half the
part learnt! It is all Krunensberg’s doing,—and the Duc didn’t stand out
one-half as he should have done; and Blanche!—the idea—the little wretch
is made of wood, and can’t even open her mouth! As for Krunensberg, he
deserves to be shot! It is all his influence that has set Nina against
the _Muscadins_,—just to spite me! What I have gone through about this
wretched theatre,—and then to have that little chit of a Blanche set over
my head, a little creature, only married out of her convent last year,—it
is unbearable! of course neither I nor Des Gommeux shall play. Oh, here
comes the Duc. No, Duc, it is not the slightest use; if you have that
ridiculous musty old piece of De Musset’s, or if you have Blanche in it
at all, you don’t have Me in anything! A nice morning’s work you have
made of it! Nina and I shall never speak again.”

The Duc laid his hat aside; his delicate features were puckered, weary,
and troubled.

“Mais, madame, pardon!—mais vous avez toutes dit les choses les plus
affreuses!——”

“Women always do, Duc, when they are in a passion,” said Lady Hilda.
“There is nothing like a scene for discovering our real opinions of each
other. Why, you look actually—worried! I thought nothing ever ruffled you
by any chance whatever.”

“Madame,” said M. de St. Louis, stretching himself, with a sigh, in a
low chair beside her and the fire, “I have always sedulously cultivated
serenity. I believe serenity to be the whole secret of human health,
happiness, longevity, good taste, sound judgment, everything in point
of fact that is desirable in the life of a human being. But, alas! we
are all mortal, and our best plans are but finite. In an evil moment,
when Pandora’s box was packed, there was put in with it by the malice
of Mercury a detonating powder, called Amateur Rivalry. When all the
other discords were dispersed, this shot itself into the loveliest
forms and the gentlest bosoms; and where it explodes, the wisest man
stands helpless. He cannot reconcile the warring elements nor retain
any personal peace himself. I am the slave of Madame Mila; I adore the
dust of the exquisite shoes of Madame Nina; I am penetrated with the
most absolute devotion to Madame Blanche: when these heavenly graces
are ready to rend each other’s hair, what can I do? What can I be
except the most unhappy person upon earth? To reconcile ladies who are
infuriated is a hopeless dream; it were easier to make whole again a
broken glass of Venice. It makes one almost wish,” added the Duc, with a
second sigh,—“almost wish that Molière had never been created, or, being
created, had never written. But for Molière I doubt very much if the
Drama as an Art would have lingered on to the present time.”

“Console yourself, my dear Duc,” said Lady Hilda, “console yourself with
a line from Molière: ‘Cinq ou six coups de bâton entre gens qui aiment ne
font que ragaillardir l’amitié.’ Mila, Nina, and Blanche will kiss each
other to-morrow; they must, or what becomes of the great Contes de Mère
d’Oie Quadrille to open the Roubleskoff ball?”

“I shall never speak to either of them long as I live,” said Madame Mila,
still ruffling all her golden feathers in highest wrath. “As for the
quadrille, the Roubleskoff must do as they can. I do think Krunensberg
has made Nina perfectly odious; I never saw anybody so altered by a man
in my life. Well, there’s one thing, it won’t last. His ‘affairs’ never
do.”

“It will last as long as her jewels do,” said Carlo Maremma.

“Oh, no, he can’t be quite so bad as that.”

“Foi d’honneur!—since he left the Sant Anselmo you have never seen her
family diamonds except in the Paris paste _replica_, which she tells you
she wears for safety and because it is such a bore to have to employ
policemen in plain clothes at the balls——”

“Talk of policemen,” said Madame Mila, “they say we’re to have a caution
sent us from the Prefecture about our playing baccarat the other night
at the café: they say no gambling is allowed in the city—the idea!”

“While the State organizes the lotteries!—how very consistent!” said the
Lady Hilda.

“All your gaming is against the law, angels of my soul,” said Carlo
Maremma.

“Then we’ll all leave Floralia,” said Madame Mila. “The idea of not being
able to do what one chooses in one’s own rooms! There is one thing, we
can always go up to Roubleskoff’s;—they will never dare to caution him.
But what is the use of all this fuss?—everybody plays,—everybody always
will play.”

“The Prefect is much too wise a man ever to imagine he can prevent ladies
doing what they like,” said Maremma. “It is those tremendous losses of
young De Fabris the other night that have made a stir, and the Prefect
thinks it necessary to say something: he is afraid of a scandal.”

“Good gracious! As if anything filled a city half so well as a scandal!
Why don’t Floralia have a good gaming-place, like Monte Carlo? we
shouldn’t want to use our own rooms then——”

“I confess,” said the Duc, in his gentle, meditative voice, “I confess
that, like Miladi here, I fail to altogether appreciate the moral
horror of a game at baccarat entertained by a municipality which in its
legislation legalizes the lottery. All gaming may be prejudicial to
the moral health of mankind; it is certainly so to their purses; I am
prepared to admit, even in face of Madame Mila’s direst wrath, that all
forms of hazard are exceedingly injurious to the character and to the
fortunes of every person tempted by them. It may be impossible even to
exaggerate their baneful influences or their disastrous consequences. But
how can a government which publicly patronizes, sustains, and enriches
itself by lotteries have any logic in condemning the pastime of hazard in
a private drawing-room or a private club-house? I confess I cannot see
how they reconcile both courses. A government, whatever it be, should
never be an anomaly.”

“Lotteries are to us what bull-fighting is to Spaniards and revolutions
are to the French,” said Carlo Maremma. “Every nation has its especial
craze. The lottery is ours.”

“But is it for a government to intensify and pander to and profit by a
national insanity?” said Della Rocca, with much seriousness. “When Rome
bent to the yell of Panem et Circenses, the days of her greatness were
numbered. Besides, the Duc is quite right,—it is a ridiculous anomaly
to condemn games while you allow lotteries. Great harm may result from
private gambling,—greater still from the public gaming-tables,—but the
evil after all is not a millionth part so terrible as the evil resulting
from the system of public lotteries. The persons who are ruined by
ordinary gaming are, after all, persons who would certainly be ruined by
some vice or another. The compound of avarice and excitement which makes
the attraction of hazard does not allure the higher kinds of character;
besides, the vice does not go to the player; the player goes to the vice.
Now, on the contrary, the lottery attacks openly, and tries to allure in
very despite of themselves, the much wider multitude that is the very sap
and support of a nation: it entices the people themselves. It lures the
workman to throw away his wage, the student to spend his time in feverish
dreams, the simple day-laborer to consume his content in senseless
calculations that often bring his poor, empty brain to madness. The
lottery assails them in the street, is carried to them in their homes,
drops them some poor prize at first to chain them in torment forever
afterwards. It changes honesty to cunning, peace to burning desire,
industry to a perpetual waiting upon chance, manly effort to an imbecile
abandonment to the dictates of signs and portents and the expectancy of
a fortune which never comes. High-born gamblers are only the topmost
leaves of the tree of the State; they may rot away without detriment to
the tree; but the lottery lays the axe to the very trunk and root of it,
because it demoralizes the people.”

Lady Hilda listened and watched him as he spoke, with a grave and almost
tender meditation in her eyes, which M. de St. Louis saw, and, seeing,
smiled.

“Say all that in the Chamber, caro mio,” muttered Carlo Maremma.

“I would go to the Chambers to say it, or to worse places even, were
there any chance it would be attended to. Madame Mila, have I been so
unhappy as to have offended you?”

“I am a top leaf that may rot! I was never told anything so rude in my
life,—from you, too! the very soul of ceremonious courtesy.”

Della Rocca made peace with her in flowery flattery.

“Well, I shall play baccarat to-night in this hotel, just because the
Prefect has been so odious and done that,” said Madame Mila. “You will
all come home with me after the Roubleskoff’s dinner? Promise!”

“Of course,” said the Princess Olga.

“Of course,” said Lady Featherleigh.

“Of course,” said everybody else.

“And if the gendarmes come in?”

“We will shoot them!”

“No; we will give them champagne,—surer and more humane.”

“I wish the Prefect would come himself: I should like to tell him my
mind,” continued Madame Mila. “So impudent of the man!—when all the Royal
Highnesses and Grand Dukes and Duchesses in Europe only come to winter
cities for play. He _must_ know that.”

“My dear Mila, how you do put yourself out about it!” said the Lady
Hilda. “Send ten thousand francs to the public charities: you may play
all night long in the cafés then.”

“Madame, j’ai l’honneur de vous saluer,” murmured Della Rocca, bending
low before her.

When the door had closed upon him and left the others behind, a sudden
blankness and dullness seemed to fall on her: she had never felt the same
thing before. Bored she had often been, but this was not _ennui_, it was
a kind of loneliness: it was as if all about her grew gray and cold and
stupid.

More ladies came in, there were endless laughter and chatter; Princess
Olga wanted some tea, and had it; the other women cracked bonbons with
their little teeth like pretty squirrels cracking fir cones; they made
charming groups in the firelight and lamplight: they made plans for a
hundred diversions; they were full of the gayest of scandals; they
dissected in the most merciless manner all their absent friends; they
scolded their lovers and gave them a thousand contradictory orders;
they discussed all the news and all the topics of the day, and arranged
for dinner-parties, and driving-parties, and costume quadrilles, and
bazaar-stalls, and boxes at the theatre, and suppers at the cafés; and
agreed that everything was as dull as ditch-water, and yet that they
never had a minute for anything; and the Lady Hilda, with the jubilant
noise and the twittering laughter round her, thought how silly they all
were, and what a nuisance it was having a day,—only if one hadn’t a day
it was worse still, because then they were always trying to run in at all
hours on every day, and one was never free for a moment.

“Thank goodness, they are gone!” she said, half aloud, to the Saxe cups
and the Capo di Monte children on the mantel-piece, when the last flutter
of fur and velvet had vanished through the door, and the last of those
dearest friends and born foes had kissed each other and separated.

Left alone, she stood thinking, by the fire, with all the lights burning
behind her in that big, empty room. What she thought was a very humble
and pensive thought for so disdainful a lady. It was only,—

“Is it myself? or only the money?”

She stood some time there, motionless, her hand playing with the gold
girdle as his hand had done; her face was pale, softened, troubled.

The clock among the Saxe dogs and the Capo di Monte little figures chimed
the half-hour after six. She started as it struck, and remembered that
she was to dine at eight with the Princess Roubleskoff,—a big party for
an English royalty on his travels.

“Anyhow, it would be of no use,” she said to herself. “Even if I did wish
it, it could never be.”

And she was angry with herself, as she had been the night before; she was
impatient of these new weaknesses which haunted her. Nevertheless she was
more particular about her appearance that night than her maids had ever
known her be; she was very difficult to satisfy; tried and discarded four
wholly new confections of her friend Worth’s, miracles of invention and
of costliness, and at length had herself dressed quite simply in black
velvet, only relieved by all her diamonds.

“He said fair women should always wear black,” she thought: it was not
her Magister of Paris of whom she was thinking as the sayer of that wise
phrase. And then again she was angry with herself for remembering such a
thing and attiring herself in obedience to it, and would have had herself
undressed again only there was but one small quarter of an hour in which
to reach the Roubleskoff villa, a palace of the fairies four miles from
the south gate. So she went as she was, casting a dubious impatient
glance behind her at the mirrors.

“I look well,” she thought, with a smile, and her content returned.

She knew that he would be present at the dinner. There is no escaping
destiny in Floralia: people meet too often.

The dinner disappointed her.

She thought it very long and very stupid. She sat between the Grand
Duke of Rittersbähn and the Envoy of all the Russias, and Della Rocca
was not placed within her sight; and after the dinner the young English
prince would talk to no one but herself, delightedly recalling to her how
often she had bowled his wickets down when they had been young children
playing on the lawns at Osborne. She felt disloyally thankless for his
preference. He monopolized her. And as the rooms filled with the crowd
of the reception she merely saw the delicate dark head of Della Rocca
afar off, bent down in eager and possibly tender conversation with his
beautiful country-woman, the Duchess Medici-Malatesta. She felt angered
and impatient.

If she had sat alone and neglected, as less lovely women often do,
instead of being monopolized by a prince, with twenty other men sighing
to take his place when etiquette should permit them, she could scarcely
have been more ill-content.

Never in all her life had it befallen her to think angrily of another
woman’s beauty; and now she caught herself irritatedly conning, across
the width of the room, the classic profile and the immense jewel-like
eyes of the Malatesta Semiramis. Never in all her life had it happened
to her to miss any one thing that she desired, and now a strange sense
of loneliness and emptiness came upon her, unreasoned and unreasoning;
and she had such an impatience and contempt of herself too all the
while!—that was the most bitter part of it.

After all, it was too absurd——

As soon as the departure of the royal guests permitted any one to leave,
she went away, contemptuous, and ill at ease; half ignorant of what
moved her, and half unwilling to probe her own emotions further.

“Plus on est fou, plus on rit,” she murmured to her pillow two hours
later, with irritable disdain, as she heard Mme. Mila and her troop
noisily passing her door as they returned to their baccarat, which was to
be doubly delightful because of the Prefect’s interdict.

“I wish I had been born an idiot!” thought the Lady Hilda,—as indeed, any
one must do who finds himself burdened with aching brains in this best of
all possible worlds.

“Perhaps, after all, you were right,” said the Duc de St. Louis, driving
back into the town with Della Rocca that night. “Perhaps you were
right. Miladi is most lovely, most exquisite, most perfect. But she has
caprices,—there is no denying that she has caprices and extravagancies
which would ruin any one short of the despotic sovereign of a very
wealthy nation.”

The Duc was a very wise man, and knew that the escalier dérobé is the
only way that leads in conversation to any direct information. Their
demeanor had puzzled him, and he spoke accordingly with shrewd design.

Della Rocca heard him with a little annoyance.

“She has not more caprices than other women that I know of,” he answered.
“Her faults are the faults rather of her _monde_ than of herself.”

“But she has adopted them with much affection!”

“They are habits,—hardly more.”

“And you were correct too in your diagnosis when you saw her first,”
continued the Duc, pitilessly. “To me she is most amiable always; but to
the generality of people it must be admitted that she is not so amiable.”

“The amiability of most women,” replied Della Rocca, “is nothing more
than that insatiate passion for admiration which makes them show their
persons almost nude at Trouville, and copy the ways and manners of
_femmes entretenues_ in the endeavor to rival such with us. If they wish
to be decent, they do not dare to be; they must be popular and _chic_
before all.”

“You are severe, but perhaps you are right. Miladi is certainly above
all such vulgarities. Indeed, she is only a little too much above
everything——”

“It is better than to be below everything,—even below our respect,—as
most of our great ladies are.”

“Certainly. Still, she is a little—a little selfish.”

“How should she be otherwise? She is quite alone,—she has no one to care
for——”

“Most women make something to care for; she has many family ties, if she
cared for them,—but she does not. No; she is beautiful, charming, _grande
dame en tout_,—but I begin to think that it is well for the peace of
mankind that she remains so invulnerable. She would probably make any man
who loved her very unhappy if she married him.”

“If he were a weak man, not otherwise.”

“Pouf! Do you think any man would ever have control over _her_?”

“I am quite sure that she would never care for any man who had not.”

“He would be a very bold person,” murmured the Duc. “However, I am very
glad that you think more highly of her. You know, mon cher, what always
was my opinion as to yourself——”

Della Rocca colored, and saw too late that his companion had forced his
card from his hands in the most adroit manner. He busied himself with
lighting a cigar.

“For myself,” he said, coldly, “I can have no object in what I say. My
own poverty is barrier sufficient. But I should be unjust not to admit
what I think of her as a friend. I believe that the habits of the world
are not so strong with her that they can satisfy her; and I believe that
with her affections touched, with tenderer ties than she has ever known,
with a home, with children, with a woman’s natural life, in fact, she
would be a much happier and very different person. Mais tout cela ne me
regarde pas.”

The Duc glanced at him and laughed softly.

“Ça vous regarde de bien près—bon succès et bon soir!” he said, as he got
out of the carriage at his hotel.

“I told him to marry her,” he thought; “but if he expects to convert her
too, he must be the boldest and most sanguine man in Europe.”

Lady Hilda made up her mind that she was tired of Floralia, as she
meditated over her chocolate the next morning, after a night which
chloral had made pretty passable, only the baccarat people had screamed
so loudly with laughter on the other side of the corridor that they had
awakened her once or twice. Yes, she certainly was tired of it. If one
did take the trouble to go into society one might as well do it all for a
big world and not a little one. It was utter nonsense about her lungs in
Paris. She would go back. She would telegraph her return to Hubert.

Hubert was her maître-d’hôtel.

She did telegraph, and told herself that she would find immense interest
in the fresco paintings which were being executed in the ball-room of
that very exquisite hotel “entre cour et jardin,” which she had deserted
in Paris, and in making nooks and corners in her already overfilled
tables and cabinets for the tazze and bacini and ivories and goldsmith’s
work she had collected in the last two months; and decided that the
wall-decorations of the drawing-rooms, which were of rose satin with
Louis Quinze paneling, were all very barbarous, utterly incorrect, and
should never have been borne with so long, and should be altered at once;
the palest amber satin was the only possible thing, with silver mirrors
and silver cornices, and not a touch of gilding anywhere; the idea had
occurred to her before a picture in the galleries, where a silver casket
was painted against an amber curtain; she would have it done immediately,
and she would go back to Paris and have her old Thursday evenings again.

After all, Paris was the only place worth living in, and doctors were
always alarmists,—old women,—everything that was stupid, unless you were
very very ill, when they did seem to dilate into demi-gods, because of
course you were weakened with morphine and other stuff and did not want
to die; though you ought to want to die, being a Christian, if you were
in the very least degree consistent; since if you were quite sure that
the next world would be so very much better than this it was utterly
illogical to be afraid of going to it:——but then were you quite sure?

The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, which has produced communists,
petroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague
restlessness even to her; although she belonged to that higher region
where nobody ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout
in seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an
“affaire des mœurs,” like decency, still the subtle philosophies and sad
negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire set
them flying had affected her slightly.

She was a true believer, just as she was a well-dressed woman, and had
her creeds just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matter of course.

Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There
was another world, and saints and angels and eternity, yes, of course;
but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into it? Who
could by any stretch of imagination conceive Madame Mila and Maurice des
Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity?

And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity,
who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor
flibbertigibbit inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gayly as a
child breaks his india rubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and
crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue?

There might be paradise for virtue, and hell for crime, but what in the
name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all
Folly? Perhaps they would be always flying about, like the souls Virgil
speaks of, “suspensæ ad ventos,” to purify themselves; as the sails of a
ship spread out to dry. The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish
they catch; well, why not? a fish has a soul if Modern Society has one;
one could conceive a fish going softly through shining waters forever
and forever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could conceive Modern
Society in the spheres?

Wandering thus from her drawing-room furniture to problems of eternity,
and only succeeding in making herself unsettled and uncomfortable,
the Lady Hilda, out of tune with everything, put off her cashmere
dressing-gown, had herself wrapped in her sables, and thought she would
go out; it was just twelve o’clock.

Looking out of the window, she saw a lady, all sables like herself, going
also out of the hotel to a coupé, the image of her own.

“Who is that?” she asked of her favorite maid.

“That is Mdlle. Léa, Miladi,” said the maid. “She came last night. She
has the suite above.”

“How dare you mention her?” said the Lady Hilda.

The little accident filled up the measure of her disgust. Mdlle. Jenny
Léa was a young lady who had seduced the affections of an emperor, three
archdukes, and an untold number of the nobility of all nations; she was
utterly uneducated, inconceivably coarse, and had first emerged from a
small drinking-shop in the dens of Whitechapel; she was the rage of the
moment, having got a needy literary hack to write her autobiography,
which she published in her own name, as “Aventures d’une Anglaise;” the
book had no decency, and as little wit, but it professed to show up the
scandals of a great court, and it made some great men ridiculous and
worse, so eighty thousand copies of it had been sold over Europe, and
great ladies leaned from their carriages eager to see Mdlle. Jenny Léa
pass by them.

Mdlle. Jenny Léa, indeed, having put the finishing-stroke to her
popularity by immense debts and a forced sale of her effects in Paris,
was the sensation of the hour, only sharing public attention with the
Père Hilarion, a young and passionately earnest Dominican, who was making
a crusade against the world, in a noble and entirely vain fervor, from
the pulpits of all the greatest churches on the Continent. It was “the
thing” to go and hear Père Hilarion, weep with him and pray with him, and
then, coming out of the church doors, to read Jenny Léa and talk of her.
It is by these admirable mixtures that Society manages to keep itself
alive.

The Père Hilarion was breaking his great heart over the vileness and
the hopelessness of it all, as any one who has any soul in him must be
disposed to do. But to Society the Père Hilarion was only a sort of
mental liqueur, as Jenny Léa was an American “pick-me-up:” that was all.
Society took them indifferently, one after the other. Of the two, of
course it preferred Jenny Léa.

The Lady Hilda in supreme disgust went out in her sables, as Mdlle. Jenny
Léa in hers drove from the door.

“What good things sumptuary laws must have been!” she thought. “If such
creatures had to dress all in yellow, now, as I think they had once (or
was it Jews?), who would talk of them, who would look at them, who would
lose money about them? Not a soul. And to think that there have been
eighty thousand people who have bought her book!”

“Has anything offended you, madame? Who or what is so unhappy?” said the
voice of Della Rocca, as she crossed the pavement of the court between
the lines of bowing hotel functionaries, who had bent their spines double
in just the same way to Mdlle. Léa three minutes previously.

“Nothing in especial,” she answered him, coldly. “Those baccarat people
kept me awake half the night; I wish the gendarmes _had_ interfered. What
wretched weather it is!”

“It is a little cold; but it is very bright,” said Della Rocca, in some
surprise, for the day, indeed, was magnificent and seasonable. “I was
coming in the hope that I might be admitted, though I know it is too
early, and not your day, and everything that it ought not to be. But I
was so unfortunate last night; you were so monopolized——”

She deigned to smile a little, but she continued to move to her brougham.

“Your climate is the very Harpagon of climates. I have not seen one warm
day yet. I am thinking of returning to Paris.”

He grew very pale.

“Is not that very sudden?” he asked her; there was a great change in his
voice.

“Oh, no; I have my house there, as you know, and Monsieur Odissôt is
painting the ball-room in frescoes. I have quite a new idea for my
drawing-rooms, too; after all, furnishing is one of the fine arts; do you
like that young Odissôt’s talent? His drawing is perfection; he was a
pupil of Hippolyte Flandrin. Good-morning.”

She was in her coupé by this time, and he was obliged to close the door
on her; but he kept his hand upon it.

“Since you are leaving us so soon and so cruelly, madame, would you honor
my own old chapel frescoes as you promised?—they might give you some
ideas for your ball-room.”

Lady Hilda deigned to smile fairly and fully this time.

“Is that a satire or a profanity,—or both together?”

“It is jealousy of Camille Odissôt! I will go to Paris and paint your
frescoes, madame, if you will let me; I can paint in fresco and in
distemper; I was a student in the Academy of San Luca in my time.”

His words were light, and his manner also, but his eyes had an expression
that made the Lady Hilda color a little and look out of the other window
of her coupé.

“I must first call upon Olga; I have promised,” she answered,
irrelevantly. “But I will join you at your palace in an hour; perhaps she
will come with me; I should not like to leave, certainly, without having
seen your chapel. Au revoir.”

“If you do leave, madame, I follow!—to paint the ball-room.”

He shut the carriage door, and stood bareheaded in the wintry wind as the
impatient horses dashed away. When it had disappeared he put his hat on,
lighted a cigar, and strolled to his own house.

“She will not go to Paris,” he said to himself.

He knew women well.

In an hour and a half she arrived at his own gates, bringing the Princess
Olga with her.

She saw the grand old garden, the mighty staircases, the courts that once
held troops of armed men; she saw his own rooms, with their tapestries
that Flemish John Rosts had had the doing of so many centuries before;
she saw the exquisite dim silent chapel, whose walls, painted by the
Memmi in one portion and continued by Masaccio, were among the famous
things of the city. She was moved and saddened; softened too; after all,
the decay of a great race has an unutterable pathos; it will touch even a
vulgar mind; she, arrogant and fastidious as to birth, as though she had
been born before the ’89, was touched by it to the core.

She had heard, too, of how he lived; without debt, yet with dignity,
with the utmost simplicity and without reproach; there was something
in his fortunes which seemed to her worthier than all distinction and
success, something that stirred that more poetic side of her nature
which the world had never allowed to awake, but which had been born with
her nevertheless. She was serious and dreaming as she lingered in the
beautiful old chapel, under whose mosaic pavement there lay the dust of
so many generations of his race. He noticed her silence, and thought to
himself,—

“Perhaps she is thinking how base it is in a man as poor as I to seek a
woman so rich as herself;” but she was not thinking that at all as she
swept on in her sables, with her delicate cheeks like the lovely Niphétos
rose against the darkness of the fur.

That immortality which she had been doubting in the morning did not seem
so absurdly impossible here. There was religion in the place, a different
one to what she had known kneeling at the _messe des paresseux_ in the
Madeleine; the sort of religion that a woman only becomes aware of when
she loves.

She started and seemed to wake from a dream when Princess Olga suggested
that it was time to go. Princess Olga was a person of innumerable
engagements, who was always racing after half an hour without ever
catching it, like the Minister-Duke of Newcastle, and like ninety-nine
people out of every hundred in the nineteenth century. There was some
bric-à-brac the princess wanted somebody to cheapen for her; she bade him
come and do it; he complied willingly enough. They went all three to that
bric-à-brac shop, and thence to another, and yet another. Then Princess
Olga, who was used to a more brilliant part than that of the “terza
incommoda,” left them to themselves over the faïence and marqueterie.

Lady Hilda, who, despite all her fashion, liked walking like every
healthy woman, dismissed her horses, and walked the length of the
river-street, he with her. People meeting them began to make conjectures,
and bets, harder than ever; and Italian ladies, looking out of their
carriage windows, wondered for the five-millionth time at the freedom of
Englishwomen,—as indeed Italian ladies have good cause to do in far more
reprehensible liberties.

They walked down to the park and back again. It was growing dusk. She
went home to her hotel, and let him enter with her, and had some tea by
the firelight; all the while he made love to her with eyes and gesture
and word, as only an Italian can, and she avoided explicit declaration of
it and direct need to reply to it, with all the consummate tact that ten
years’ practice in such positions had polished in her.

It was a charming pastime,—were it nothing more. It was quite a pity when
Madame Mila entered unsuspecting, and full of new wrongs in the matter of
the Muscadins and fresh gossip concerning some forty people’s marriages,
divorces, debts, ignominies, and infamies. It is fortunate that there are
so many wicked people in Society; for if there were not, what would the
good people have to talk about? they would die of paralysis of the tongue.

“You will not leave us for Paris, yet?” he murmured, as he rose, with a
sigh, only heard by her ear.

She smiled, and balanced a Devoniensis tea-rose idly in her hands.

“Not just yet, if your weather prove better.”

He drew the tea-rose away from her fingers unseen even by the quick,
marmoset eyes of little Madame Mila, who as it chanced was busied making
herself a cup of tea. She let it go.

“You should have seen all the men looking after that horrible Léa,”
said Madame Mila, drinking her compound of cream and sugar, as the door
closed on him. “They have eyes for nothing else, I do think; and only
fancy her having the very suite above mine—it is atrocious! They say the
things at her sale fetched fabulous sums. Little pomatum and rouge pots,
five hundred francs each! They say she has fixed her mind on young Sant’
Andrea here; I suppose she has heard he is enormously rich. Oh, did you
know Gwendolen Doncaster has come? She has lost all her money at Monte
Carlo, and she has dyed her hair a nice straw color; she looks fifteen
years younger, I do assure you. Don is shooting in Dalmatia: of course
she abuses him,—poor old Don! I wonder how we should have got on if he
had married me, as he wanted. Gwen told me Lord Derbyshire has run off
with Mrs. Wheelskaitte—what he _can_ see in her! and those open scandals
are so stupid, where is the use of them? Surely you can do what you like
without calling all the world in to see you doing it. When a woman has
an easy husband she _never_ need compromise herself, and Wheelskaitte
certainly always was that. Oh, you never would know them, I remember,
because they were new people; she was an odious creature, and very ugly,
but they gave very good parties in London, and their cottage was as nice
a one as you could go to for Ascot. You used to like little Wroxeter,
did not you? he was such a pretty boy: he has just left Eton, and he is
wild to marry a girl out of a music-hall, so Gwen says. These creatures
get all the good marriages nowadays:—and two hundred new débutantes
waiting for the first Drawing-room this month! Have you seen the new
book, ‘Confessions d’un Feu-Follet’? Maurice has just brought it to me.
It is rivaling Jenny Léa; and they say it is worse,—quite unmentionable;
everybody is talking about it. It was out last week, and they have sold
five editions. The man called Bistrim in it is Bismarck. No; I don’t
know that it is witty. I don’t think things are witty nowadays. It is
horrible and _infect_; but you can’t put it down till you’ve done it. Old
Lady Manlever is dying at the Pace Hôtel here,—of undigested scandal,
Featherleigh says; but I believe it’s gastritis. What a nasty old woman
she has always been! I have just left a card with inquiries and regrets;
I do hope she won’t get better. I won ever so much at play last night. I
forgot to tell you so; I bought that _rocaille_ necklace on the Jewelers’
Bridge; it was only six thousand francs, and it really did belong to the
Comtesse d’Albany. It’s very pretty, too——”

So Madame Mila discoursed, greatly to her own satisfaction. She loved
so much to hear her own tongue, that she always chose the stupidest and
silliest of her lovers for her chief favors: a clever man had always
ideas of his own, and was sure to want to express them sometime or
another. All she desired were listeners and echoes. Discussion may be
the salt of life to a few, but listeners and echoes are the bonbons and
cigarettes that no woman can do without.

The Lady Hilda, sitting looking into the fire, with her eyes nearly
closed, murmured yes, and no, and indeed, in the proper places, and let
her run on, hearing not one word. Those fingers which had entangled
themselves so softly with her own withdrawing the tea-rose, had left a
magnetic thrill upon her,—a dreamy, lulling pleasure.

That evening the good Hubert received a second telegram contradicting
the first which had announced his mistress’s return, and putting off
that return indefinitely. The good Hubert, who was driving her best
horses, drinking her best wines, drawing large checks for accounts never
examined, and generally enjoying his winter, was much relieved, and
hastened to communicate the happy change to Monsieur Camille Odissôt,
whom the first telegram had also cast into great consternation, since
that clever but idle young gentleman, having been prepaid half the sum
agreed on for the fresco-painting, had been spending it joyously after
the tastes of young artists, assisted by a pretty brown actress, of the
Folies Marigny, and had not at that moment even begun to touch the walls
and the ceiling of the ball-room confided to his genius.

“But you had better begin, though she is not coming back,” said the
good Hubert, surveying the blank waste of prepared plaster. “Miladi is
not often out of temper, but when she is—ouf! I would as soon serve a
Russian. Better begin; paint your best, because she knows,—Miladi knows,
and she is hard to please in those things. Not but what I dare say as
soon as you have done it all she will take it into her head that it looks
too cold, or looks too warm, or will not compose well, or something or
other, and will cover it all up with silk and satin. But that will not
matter to you.”

“Not at all,” said Monsieur Camille, who, though he had been a pupil of
Flandrin, had learned nothing of that true master’s conscientiousness
in art, but was a clever young man of a new generation, who drew
beautifully, as mechanically as a tailor stitches beautifully, and was of
the very wise opinion that money was everything.




CHAPTER VIII.


The Postiche ball came off, and was a brilliant success. Madame Mila
announced the next morning when she got up that she had never enjoyed
anything better,—not even at the Tuileries.

“And the hostess?” said Lady Hilda.

“I didn’t even see her, thank goodness,” said Madame Mila, frankly. “I
went late, you know, and she’d been standing at the door four hours, and
had got tired, and had gone off duty into the crowd somewhere. Of course
it wasn’t my business to go and look for her.”

“Of course not; but you brought off your cotillon things?”

“Yes. There they are,” said Madame Mila, unconscious of any satire. “I
never saw such _luxe_,—no, not even in the dear old Emperor’s time: the
things everybody got must have cost hundreds of thousands of francs.
Certainly little Dickie managed it beautifully. He ordered the whole
affair, you know.”

“Little Dickie, or anybody else, could float Medea herself in society if
she would brew cotillon toys of a new sort in her caldron,” said the Lady
Hilda.

“Medea?” said Madame Mila, who knew about her because she had seen
Ristori so often. “Poor thing! it was that horrid Jason that deserved
to be put out of society, only men never do get put out of it for
anything they do; I don’t know how it is,—we cut no end of women,
but we never cut a man. Well, I assure you, my dear, the ball was
charming,—_charming_, though you do look so contemptuous. We had all our
own people, and saw nobody else, all night. I don’t think I need bow to
the woman, do you? I’m not supposed to have seen her, though I do know
her by sight, a little podgy sunburnt-looking fat creature, with liveries
for all the world like what the sheriffs have in England at assize-time.
No; I’m sure I needn’t bow to her. I told Dickie beforehand I shouldn’t.”

“No doubt Dickie was delighted to have you on any terms.”

“Of course; and I’ll send a card to-day,” said Madame Mila, with the
magnanimous air of one who does a very noble thing.

From that time thenceforward she would forget the Joshua R. Postiches
and everything concerning them as absolutely as if she had never heard
anything about them; the woman’s second ball, if she gave one, would be
nothing new, and no sort of fun whatever.

“You’re always at me about Maurice,” she said, pursuing her own ideas.
“Look at Olga with Carlo Maremma!—she did make him go last night, and
he was the only Italian there. You talk of Maurice: Olga is twice as
careless as I am——”

“Olga is my friend; don’t discuss her, please.”

“Oh, that’s very fine,—when you are always finding fault with me about
Maurice!”

“I should not let any third person blame you.”

“You are very strange, Hilda,” said Madame Mila, eying her with a
curious wonder, and ruffling herself up in her embroidered pink cashmere
dressing-gown, as if she were a little bird in the heart of a big rose.
“Why should you defend people behind their back? Nobody ever does. We all
say horrible things of one another; but we don’t mean half of them, so
what does it matter? I don’t blame Olga, not in the least; Schouvaloff is
a brute, and, besides, he knows it very well, and he doesn’t mind a bit;
indeed, of course he’s glad enough——”

“I do blame Olga; but I can’t see how _you_ can,” said her cousin, coldly.

Madame Mila ruffled herself more, looking more and more like a little
angry bird in the middle of a pink rose.

“I? Pray what _can_ anybody say of me? Spiridion is always with me half
the year at least. Spiridion is extremely fond of Maurice, so are all the
children. He’s at another hotel, right at the other end of the place;
really I can’t see why I must rush out of a town because a friend happens
to come into it also——”

“My dear Mila, pray don’t talk that nonsense to me,” said her cousin,
serenely. “I dare say ten years hence you will marry your little Lili to
M. des Gommeux; people do do that sort of thing, though they find fault
with the plots of the old Greek plays; I suppose it ‘saves society;’ at
least it saves appearances. Olga is imprudent, I know, and wrong; but at
least she has the courage of her opinions; she does not talk all that
paltry pusillanimous prurient absurdity about ‘friendship.’”

“Nobody can understand you, Hilda; and I don’t know what you mean about
Greek plays,” muttered Madame Mila. “Everybody lives in the same way:
you talk as if it were only _me_! Spiridion never says a word to me;
what business have you?”

“None in the least, dear; only you will bring up the subject. Qui
s’excuse s’accuse. That is all. You are not coming out this morning?
Au revoir, then; I am going to see a newly-found San Cipriano il Mago
outside the gates; they think it is by Il Moretto. The face and dress are
Venetian, they say; but you care nothing at all about that, do you?”

“Nothing,” said Madame Mila, with a yawn. “I suppose if it take your
fancy you’ll be buying the whole church with it in, if you can’t get
it any other way. I wish I’d your money: I wouldn’t waste it on old
pictures, that only make a room dark; and the kind of light _they_ want
is horribly unbecoming to people.”

“I promise you I shall not hang an altar-piece in a room,” said the Lady
Hilda. “I leave that for the heretics and the bourgeoisie. Good-by, my
dear.”

“Who’s going with you?” cried Madame Mila after her. Lady Hilda hesitated
a moment.

“Nina is, and the French artist who has discovered the Moretto, and—M.
della Rocca.”

Madame Mila laughed, and took up a little mirror to see if all the color
on her face were quite right. One horrible never-to-be-forgotten day, one
eyebrow had been higher than the other.

Lady Hilda, descending the hotel staircase, met the faithful Maurice
ascending. That slender and indefatigable leader of cotillons swept his
hat to the ground, twisted the waxed ends of his small moustache, and
murmured that he was about to inquire of the servants if Madame la
Comtesse were “tout à fait remise après ses fatigues incroyables.”

Lady Hilda, whom he feared very greatly, passed him with a chilly
salutation, and he went on up the stairs, and in two minutes’ time was
assuring Madame Mila that she was “fraîche comme la rosée du matin,”
which did credit to his ready chivalry of compliments, since he was
aware of all the mysteries of those bright cheeks and that small
pomegranate-like mouth, and had even, once or twice before great balls,
given an artistic touch or two to their completion, having graduated
with much skill and success in such accomplishments under the tuition of
Mademoiselle Rose Thé, and La Petite Boulotte.

The San Cipriano was to be found in a church some five miles out of the
city,—a lonely church set high on a fragrant hill-side, with sheep among
the olive-boughs, and the ox-plow under the vines that were all about it,
and high hedges of wild roses and thickets of arbutus rambling around its
old walled grave-yard.

The paths close round it were too steep for the horses, and the last
half-mile had to be climbed on foot.

It was one of those spring days which often fall in February; the ground
was blue with violets, and the grass golden with crocus and hepatica;
there were butterflies and bees on the air; the mavis and blackbird were
singing.

The San Cipriano hung over a side-altar in the dark, desolate, grand
old church, where no worshiper ever came except a tired peasant, or a
shepherd sheltering from a storm.

Della Rocca pulled aside the moth-eaten curtains from the adjacent
window, and let the sunshine in. Some little children were sitting on
the altar-steps, stringing daisies and berries; the light made a halo
about their heads; the deep Venetian colors of the forgotten picture
glanced like jewels through the film of the dust of ages. Its theme was a
martyrdom of the Magician and of St. Justina; beneath were the crowds of
Nicomedia and the guards of Diocletian, above were the heavens opened and
the hosts of waiting angels. It was a great theme greatly treated.

“It is one of the most beautiful legends that we have, to my thinking,”
said Della Rocca, when they had studied it minutely and in all lights.
“It has been very seldom selected by painters for treatment; one wonders
why; perhaps because there is too much human passion in it for a sacred
subject.”

“Yes,” said Lady Hilda, dreamily. “One can never divest oneself of the
idea that Santa Justina loved him with an earthly love.”

“Oh, Hilda! how pagan of you!” said the Marchesa del Trasimene, a little
aghast.

“Not at all. Why should we doubt it?” said Della Rocca, quickly. “Why
should we deny that a pure love would have power against the powers of
the world?”

Lady Hilda looked at him, and a great softness came into her face; then
she stooped to the little children playing with the berries on the
altar-steps, and put some money in their little brown hands.

“It is a very fine picture,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “I do not
think I have ever seen brown and gold and crimson so beautifully managed,
and fused in so deep a glow of color, save in Palma Vecchio’s Santa
Barbara—you remember—in Santa Maria Formosa in Venice?”

“The portrait of Violante Palma,—yes. But this subject has a deeper and
warmer interest. Santa Barbara with her tower and her cannon is too
strong to touch one very much. One cannot think that she ever suffered.”

“Yet Santa Barbara has a very wide popularity, if one may use the word to
a saint.”

“All symbols of strength have; the people are weak; they love what will
help them. It is very singular what deep root and vast fame one saint
has, and how obscure remains another; yet both equal in holiness of
life and courage of death. Perhaps the old painters have done it by the
frequency of their choice of certain themes.”

“Oh, no,” said Lady Hilda; “be sure the painters rather followed the
public preference than directed it. Poets lead; painters only mirror. I
like this San Cipriano very much. They did not say too much of it. It is
left to dust and damp. Could I buy it, do you think?”

“I dare say; I will inquire for you to-morrow. We sell anything now.
When the public debt is a little heavier, and the salt tax is protested
against, we shall sell the Transfiguration. Why not?—we have a copy at
St. Peter’s. Indeed, why keep the St. Cecilia doing nothing in a dark old
church in Bologna, when its sale with a few others might make a minister
or a senator well off for life?”

“Do not be so bitter, Paolo,” said the Marchesa Nina: “you might have
been a minister yourself.”

“And rebuilt Palestrina out of my commission on the tax on cabbages! Yes,
I have lost my opportunities.”

The Lady Hilda was gazing at the clouds of angels in the picture, who
bore aloft the martyred souls in their immortal union; and from them
she glanced at the little fair wondering faces of the peasant children.
She had never thought about children in any way, save as little figures
that composed well in Stothard’s drawings, in Sir Joshua’s pictures, in
Correggio’s frescoes. Now, for a second, the thought glanced through her
that women were happy who had those tender soft ties with the future of
the world. What future had she?—You cannot make a future out of diamonds,
china, and M. Worth.

“You really wish to buy the San Cipriano?” he asked her, as they passed
over the worn, damp pavement towards the sunlight of the open door.

“Yes. You seem to think it sacrilege.”

“No; I think the moral decadence of feeling which makes it possible for
my nation to sell such things is a sacrilege against our past, and a
violation of the rights of our posterity; but that is another matter, and
no fault of yours. What will you do with it when you have it?”

“I will put it in my oratory in Paris.”

The answer jarred on him; yet there was no other which he could have
expected.

“How naturally you think of buying all you see!” he said, a little
impatiently. “I suppose that power of acquisition—that wand of
possession—is very dear to you.”

“What do you mean? I do not know; it is a habit. Yes; I suppose one likes
it.”

“No doubt. Your riches are to you as his magic was to San Cipriano
yonder,—the willingest of slaves.”

“What!—an evil spirit, then?”

“Not necessarily. But——”

“But what?”

“A despot, though a slave; one who holds your soul; as the powers of
darkness held his, until a great and spiritual love set him free.”

They were passing out of the open door-way into the calm golden light
of the passing day. Through the fine tracery of the olive-boughs the
beautiful valley shone like a summer sea. Before them, above the southern
mountains, the sun was going down. Her eyes grew dim for a moment as she
looked. His hand had closed on hers; she let it lie within his clasp; it
was the first gesture of tenderness she had ever allowed to him. Then at
a sudden recollection she withdrew it, and she smiled with her old serene
indifference.

“You _will_ talk to me in unknown tongues! Santa Justina was a holy
woman; I am not. I am not sure that I ever did any unselfish thing in all
my life. How many violets there are!—gather me some.”

The others drew near; he left her and gathered the violets. They were
countless; the old church was left alone to perish; no foot of priest or
worshiper now ever trod upon their purple glories.

She leaned over the low wall of the grave-yard, and watched the setting
sun. She felt that her eyes were full of tears.

“If I had met him earlier——” she thought.

They walked down through the olive thickets, along the grassy slopes of
the hill, to the carriage, and drove home in the now waning light.

She was capricious, contemptuous, ironical, arrogant, in everything she
said, lying back with the furs covering her from the chill evening winds.

“Does going to a church always make you so caustic, cara mia?” said the
Marchesa Nina.

Della Rocca was very silent. The French artist kept up the ball of talk
with her and the lovely Marchesa, and played the gay game well. The sun
sank quite; the brief twilight came; then darkness; the horses took
them down through the walled lanes and the rose hedges into the narrow
streets, where here and there the lamps were twinkling, and the glow of
the wood fires shone through the grated casements.

The carriage paused first at the Hôtel Murat.

“I shall see you to-night at Princess Furstenberg’s, Hilda, of course?”
said the Marchesa.

“Oh, yes,” said the Lady Hilda, as she descended, drawing her sables
closer around her. “You will be there, I suppose?” she added, with a
little change of her voice, to Della Rocca, as he held his arm for her to
alight. He looked straight down into her eyes.

“I think not,” he said, simply. “Good-night, madame.”

He stood with his head uncovered, whilst she went up the steps of the
hotel; then, as the door closed on her, he walked away to his own old
house.

Lady Hilda went up to her own rooms; she had a knot of violets with her.
Before she put them in water she touched them with her lips,—as any girl
of sixteen or any peasant Gretchen might have done.

That night at the Princess Furstenberg’s—one of the pleasantest houses
of the winter city—men and women both said to one another that they had
never seen her looking more beautiful, or more magnificent in the blaze
of her jewels, but they found her colder and more difficult to converse
with than ever, and were more than ever hopelessly impressed with the
sense of their own absolute nullity in her eyes.

He was not there.

She stayed but a brief time,—long enough to chill every one there like
ice, which was the effect she always produced in society when it was so
unhappy as not to please her; then, having frozen it, she left it,—the
ladies who remained breathing freer when her delicate loveliness and
her mighty emeralds had ceased to outshine them. She sank back in her
carriage with a great sigh.

The homeward streets led past the palace of the Della Rocca. She let
the window down, and looked outward, as she passed it. She saw a single
casement alone lighted in the great black mass of frowning stone, with
its machicolated walls and iron stanchions. It was above the entrance;
she knew it was his favorite room,—where his books were, and his old
bronzes, and his favorite weapons.

Her eyes filled with tears again as she looked up at the solitary light.
She felt for the little cluster of violets that she had fastened under
the great emeralds in her bosom; his hand had gathered them.

“If any one had told me I would care!” she thought to herself.

The tears on her lashes stole slowly down, and dimmed the emeralds and
refreshed the violets.

She was the most heartless creature in the world,—the coldest and most
self-engrossed of women, her friends and acquaintances were saying, after
her departure, in the drawing-rooms of the Princess Furstenberg. Not like
her cousin; dear little Madame Mila was all good nature, all kindliness,
all heart.

At the Fiera for the orphan children the week before, had not dear
little Madame Mila slaved herself to death, bustling about in the most
bewitching costume, whirling like a Japanese windmill, wearing the
loveliest little muslin apron, with huge pockets, into which thousands
of francs were poured, turning the lottery-wheel indefatigably for three
days, and selling cigars she had lighted, and lilies of the valley she
had kissed, at the most fabulous prices, for the good of the poor?

And had not Lady Hilda contemptuously refused to have anything to do with
the Fiera at all?

The almoner of the charities, indeed, had received a fifty-thousand-franc
note anonymously. But, then, how could anybody divine that the Lady Hilda
had sent it because a chance word of Della Rocca’s had sunk into her
mind? Whereas everybody saw Madame Mila whirling and saying so prettily,
“Pour nos pauvres!—pour nos chers pauvres!”




CHAPTER IX.


The next morning they brought her a note; it said that he had inquired
about the San Cipriano, but the matter had to be referred to some
authority absent in Rome, and there could be no answer for a few days,
perhaps weeks. The note was signed with the assurance of the highest
consideration of the humblest of her servants,—Paolo della Rocca.

The note might have been read from the house-top: she had had letters
from him of a different strain, charming little brief letters, about a
flower, about an opera-box, about a piece of pottery,—always about some
trifle, but making the trifle the medium of a delicately-veiled homage
and a softly-hinted tenderness.

She tossed the note into the fire, and saw his name burn in the clear
flame of a pine branch: why could he not have called, instead of writing?

She was restless all day, and nothing pleased her,—not even M. de St.
Louis, who did call, and sat a long time, and was in his most delightful
humor, and full of new anecdotes about everybody and everything; but he
did not mention Della Rocca.

The Duc found no topic that suited her.

It was the Corso di Gala that afternoon; would she not go?

No: her horses hated masks, and she hated noise.

The Veglione on Sunday; would she not go to that?

No: those things were well enough in the days of Philippe d’Orléans,
who invented them, but they were now only as stupid as they were vulgar;
anybody was let in for five francs.

Did she like the new weekly journal that was electrifying Paris?

No: she could see nothing in it: there was no wit nowadays,—only
personalities, which grew more gross every year.

The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and Archilochus,
and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of Hipponax drove
Bupalus to hang himself.

She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.

People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere,
called “In a Hothouse,” the hothouse being Society: had she seen it?

No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never had
been in it? The last English “society” novel she had read had described a
cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in the crowd with
everybody else, instead of by the _petite entrée_; they were always full
of such blunders.

Had she read the new French story “Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi”?

No: she had heard too much of it; it made one almost wish for a
censorship of the press.

The Duc agreed that literature was terribly but truly described as “un
tas d’ordures soigneusement enveloppé.”

She said that the “tas d’ordures” without the envelope was sufficient for
popularity, but that the literature of any age was not to be blamed; it
was only a natural growth, like a mushroom: if the soil were noxious, the
fungus was bad.

The Duc wondered what a censorship would let pass if there were one.

She said that when there was one it had let pass Crébillon, the Chevalier
Le Clos, and the “Bijoux Indiscrets;” it had proscribed Marmontel,
Helvetius, and Lanjuinais. She did not know how one man could be expected
to be wiser than all his generation.

The Duc admired some majolica she had purchased.

She said she began to think that majolica was a false taste; the metallic
lustre was fine, but how clumsy often the forms! one might be led astray
by too great love of old work.

The Duc praised a magnificent Sèvres panel, just painted by Riocreux and
Goupil, and given to her by Princess Olga on the New Year.

She said it was well done, but what charm was there in it? All their
modern iron and zinc colors, and hydrate of aluminum, and oxide of
chromium, and purple of Cassius, and all the rest of it, never gave
one-tenth the charm of those old painters who had only green grays
and dull blues and tawny yellows and never could get any kind of red
whatever; Olga had meant to please her, but she, for her part, would much
sooner have had a little panel of Abruzzi, with all the holes and defects
in the pottery, and a brown contadina for a Madonna; there was some
interest in that,—there was no interest in that gorgeous landscape and
those brilliant hunting-figures.

The Duc bore all the contradictions with imperturbable serenity and
urbanity, smiled to himself, and bowed himself out in perfect good humor.

“Tout va bien,” he thought to himself; “Miladi must be very much in love
to be so cross.”

The Duc’s personal experience among ladies had made him of opinion that
love did not improve the temper.

“The carriage waits, Miladi,” said her servant.

“I shall not drive to-day,” said Lady Hilda. “Tell them to saddle Saïd.”

It was a brilliant day; all the bells were pealing, and the sunshine and
the soft wind streaming in. She thought a ten-mile stretch across the
open country might do her good; at any rate, it would be better than
sitting at home, or pacing slowly in the procession of the Corso di Gala,
which was only a shade less stupid than the pelting Corso.

Saïd was a swift, nervous, impetuous horse,—the only sort of horse
she cared to ride; and he soon bore her beyond the gates, leaving the
carriages of her friends to crush each other in the twisting streets, and
vie in state liveries and plumes and ribbons and powdered servants, and
amuse the good-natured, kindly, orderly crowds of Floralia, clustered on
the steps of churches and under the walls of palaces.

She rode against the wind, as straight as the state of the roads would
permit her, as wonderful a sight to the astonished country-people as
though she had been Santa Margarita on her dragon. Saïd took a few stone
walls and sunken fences which put him on good terms with himself. She was
in no mood to spare him, or avoid any risks it might amuse him to run;
and they had soon covered many more miles than she knew.

“Where are we?” she asked her groom, when Saïd slackened his pace at last.

The groom, who was a Scotchman, had no idea and no power of asking.

“It does not matter,” said his mistress, and rode on again.

They were on a tolerably broad road, with a village above them, on
a steep green vine-clad hill; there were the usual olive-orchards
everywhere, with here and there pear- and plum-trees, which had not
yet begun to show their silver buds, and farther still all around the
countless curves of the many mountain-spurs that girdle the valley of
Floralia. There was another stone wall in front of them; beyond it the
turf looked green and pleasant; she put Saïd at it, but some one from a
distance called out to her in Italian, “For God’s sake stop the horse!”

On the other side of the wall the ground fell suddenly to a depth of
twenty feet.

She caught up Saïd’s head in time only by a moment; he stood erect on
his hind legs for a second, but she kept her seat unshaken; she thought
he would lose his balance and fall back on her; but she stilled and
controlled him with the coolest nerve. As he descended on his front feet,
Della Rocca came through a high iron gate on the left, leaped a ditch,
and sprang to the horse’s head.

“How can you do such mad things?” he said, with a quiver in his voice.
“That gate was locked; I could only shout to you. I thought I was too
late——”

His face was pale as death; her color had not even changed. She looked at
him, and smiled a little.

“So many thanks! it is a silly habit, taking walls; I learned to like it
when I was a child and rode with my brother. Saïd is not frightened now;
you may let him alone. Where are we?”

“On the ground of Palestrina.”

“Palestrina! I see nothing of your villa.”

“We are eight miles from the villa. It lies beyond those other hills; but
all the ground here is mine. I was visiting one of my farms. By heaven’s
mercy I saw you——”

His voice still faltered, and his face was pale with strong emotion; his
hand had closed on hers, and rested on her knee.

“You were behind that tall gate, then?”

“Yes; I have the key of that gate, but the lock was rusted. Come and rest
a moment: you are a long way from Floralia. There is an old farm-house
here; they are all my own people.”

She dismounted, and threw the bridle to her groom.

“It terrifies you more than it did me,” she said, with a little laugh.

He took both her hands and kissed them; he did not answer, neither did
she rebuke him.

He led her through the iron gate down a grassy path between the gray
gnarled olive-trees and the maples with their lithe red boughs; there
was a large old house with clouds of pigeons round it; and great
mulberry-trees near, and sculptured shields and lions on the walls; women
ran to him delightedly, men left their plows afar off and came, eager and
bareheaded, to see if there was any chance to serve him; he was their
prince, their lord, their idol, their best friend; as their fathers had
followed his to the death, so would they have followed him. Half a dozen
flew to do each word of his bidding,—brought in the horse, brought out
an oaken settle for her in the sun, brought fresh water from the spring,
fresh lemons from the tree, fresh violets from the hedges.

At a sign from him, one of the shepherd-boys, who was famous for his
singing, came and stood before them, and sang to his guitar some of the
love-songs of the province in a sweet tenor voice, liquid as the singing
of nightingales. The green and gracious country was around, the low sun
made the skies of the west radiant, the smell of the woods and fields
rose fresh from the earth. She drank the draught he made for her, and
listened to the singing, and watched the simple, pastoral, old-world life
around her, and felt her heart thrill as she met the amorous worship of
his eyes.

She had never thought of natural beauty, or of the lives of the poor,
save now and then when they had been recalled to her by some silvery
landscape of Corot or some sad rural idyl of Millet; as she sat here, she
felt as if she had passed all her life in some gorgeous heated theatre,
and had only now come out into the open air and under the arch of heaven.

There was a wonderful, dreamy, lulling charm in this olive-hidden
solitude: she did not care to move, to think, to analyze. He did not
speak to her of love; they both avoided words, which, spoken, might break
the spell of their present peace and part them; but every now and then
his eyes looked into hers, and were heavy with the languor of silent
passion, and stirred her heart to strange sweet tumult.

When the boy sang the passionate, plaintive, love-songs, then her face
grew warm, and her eyelids fell: it was no longer an unknown tongue to
her.

She would not think of the future: she resigned herself to the charm of
the hour.

So did he also. The night before, he had resolved to avoid her, to cease
to see her, to forget her. She had wounded him, and he had told himself
that it was best to let the world have her, body and soul. Now chance had
overruled his resolve: he could not war with his fate; he let it come as
it might. He had found his way to influence her; he knew that he could
move her as no other could; yet he hesitated to say to her what must
unite them or part them.

Besides, since this woman had grown dear to him with a passion alike
born out of her physical beauty and his own sense of power on her and
his insight into the richer possibilities of her nature, the colder
calculations which had occupied him at his first knowledge of her seemed
to him base and unworthy; if he had not loved her he would have pursued
her with no pang of conscience; having grown to love her, to love her
loveliness, and her pride, and her variableness, and her infinite
charm, and her arrogant faults, to love _her_ in a word, and to desire
indescribably to lead her from the rank miasma of the pleasures and pomps
of the world into a clearer and higher spiritual atmosphere, he recoiled
more and more day by day from seeking her as the medium of his own
fortune, he checked himself more and more in the utterance of a passion
which could but seem to her mingled at the least with the lowest of
motives.

He was her lover, he did not disguise it from himself or her; but he
paused before doing that which would make him win or lose it all; not
because he feared his fate, but because he could not bring himself to the
acceptance of it.

“Sing me something yourself,” she said to him; and he took the boy’s
mandolin, and, leaning against the porch of the house, touched a chord of
it now and then, and sang her every thing she would, while the sun shone
in the silver of the olives and the afternoon shadows stole slowly down
the side of the mountains. Then he sat down on the steps at her feet, and
talked to her of his people, of his land, of his boyhood and his youth.

“I have lived very much in the great world,” he said, after a time,—“this
world which you think is the only one. But I am never so well content as
when I come back here under my olives. I suppose you cannot understand
that?”

“I am not sure: yes, perhaps. One grows tired of everything.”

“Everything that is artificial, you mean. People think Horace’s love of
the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After the
strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan court,
the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to him. I
know it is the fashion to think that a love of Nature belongs only to
the Moderns; but I do not think so. Into Pindar, Theocritus, Meleager,
the passion for Nature must have entered very strongly; what _is_ modern
is the more subjective, the more fanciful, feeling which makes Nature a
sounding-board to echo all the cries of man.”

“But that is always a Northern feeling.”

“Inevitably. With us Nature is too _riante_ for us to grow morbid about
it. The sunshine that laughs about us nine months of every year, the
fruits that grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw to
the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very
sea-sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow up
among from infancy makes our love of Nature only a kind of unconscious
joy in it; but here even the peasant has that, and the songs of the men
that cannot read or write are full of it. If a field-laborer sing to his
love, he will sing of the narcissus and the crocus, as Meleager sang to
Heliodora twenty centuries ago——”

“And your wild narcissus is the true narcissus,—the Greek narcissus, with
its many bells to one stem?”

“Yes. In March and April it will be out everywhere in the fields and
woods about here. I thought once that you loved flowers as you loved art,
merely as a decoration of your salon. But I was wrong. They are closer
to your heart than that. Why do you deny your emotions? Why do you mask
yourself under such cold phrases as those you used to me yesterday?”

She smiled a little.

“How should I remember what I said so long back as yesterday?”

“That is hard!—for those who hear may remember for a lifetime. Your words
kept me from where you were last night.”

“What I say at any time is worth but little thought. I fear you think
too well of me always,” she said, on a sudden vague impulse and the first
pang of humility that she had ever known to smite the superb vanity that
had always enwrapped her.

With a soft grace of action he touched with his lips the hem of her
riding-skirt.

“No,” he said simply, “you might indeed ‘daze one to blindness like the
noonday sun.’ But I am not blind. I see in you many errors more against
yourself than others; I see the discontent which always argues high
unsatisfied desire, and the caprice which is merely the offshoot of too
long indulgence of all passing fancies; but what matter those?—your
nature and the nobility of it lie underneath them in a vein of gold
unworked. You have had the language of flattery to nausea: I do not give
it you; I say but what I believe.”

The tears sprang into her eyes, and the music of his voice thrilled
through her.

She did not care to wait for the words that she knew would follow as his
fingers stole and clasped hers close, and she felt on her the gaze she
did not dare to meet. She rose, and glanced to the west.

“The sun is just gone behind the hills. I shall be late. Will you tell
them to bring me Saïd?”

He rose, too, and did not oppose her departure.

“I rode here myself, fortunately,” he said. “You must allow me to go with
you into Floralia; the roads are bad and hard to find.”

They brought Saïd out of the great wooden sweet-smelling outhouse, and
he raised her in silence to her saddle. He gave her a little knot of the
fragrant leafless calycanthus with a few sprays of myrtle; she put it in
her bosom; it was already dusk, and he saw the softened dimness of her
eyes.

They rode down together in the declining light through the winding ways
of the outlying country into the town; it was quite dark when they
reached the gates; they had ridden fast and spoken scarcely at all.

As he lifted her from Saïd in the gloom within the scarcely-lighted
street, he pressed her softly for one second in his arms, so that she
felt the beating of his heart.

“Dio te guarde,” he murmured.

She left him in silence, and without rebuke.

“Is that you, Paolo?” said the voice of Madame Mila in the darkness,
as a carriage, gorgeous with amber and gold liveries and with Carnival
camellias at the horses’ heads, pulled up with great noise and haste
before the hotel door.

“Is that you, Paolo? I am so glad! I wanted to speak to you. The Corso
was horridly stupid. I don’t care a bit except for the pelting days: do
you? I sprained my arm last year in Rome with the pelting, and I really
blinded poor Solvario for a week. Why, dear me, that’s Saïd! Have you and
Hilda been riding together?”

“I met your cousin, madame, by chance; she had lost her way. It is very
easy to do so among our hills.”

“How very fortunate that you met her!” said Madame Mila, with a little
saucy laugh. “She will kill herself riding that horrid Saïd some
day:—perhaps she will listen to you if you tell her not. What was it I
wanted to say?—oh, I want a very good box for the Veglione. You are one
of the directors of the opera, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Well, mind I have one,—big enough to hold the supper-table
comfortably; and see Maurice about it, and dine with me to-morrow, will
you? Nina and Olga and the usual people. Dear me! how these horses do
fidget! How very nice that you should have met dear Hilda just when she’d
lost her way! Good-by; but of course you’ll be at the Roubleskoff’s
to-night? I wish it wasn’t costume. I’m embroidered all over with Union
Jacks. I’m England; and I have a little Khedive on a gold stick that
keeps tumbling up and down, and I carry a ship in full sail on the top of
my head. I assure you it’s very trying to be a Naval Power. How ever I
shall be able to waltz with that ship!”

Della Rocca rode away in the darkness, as the skirts of Madame Mila
vanished in the hotel door-way with the gleam of golden-pheasant
trimmings shining under the gas-lamp.

He went home to his solitary dinner, and scarcely touched it, and barely
even noticed his dog. He sat alone a long time, thinking, in the same
room where, four months before, he had pondered on the Duc de St. Louis’s
counsels, and had decided to himself that this woman, beautiful though
she was, was arrogant, unimpressionable, extravagantly capricious, and in
every way antagonistic to him.

Now he was passionately in love with her himself; he knew that she was in
love with him; he believed that he had only to ask and have.

And yet he hesitated.

It was the marriage of all other marriages for him; he had softened
and subdued her in a manner which could not but intoxicate his vanity,
though he had less vanity than most men; he did not distrust her
character, because he believed that there was a vague lofty nobility in
it, and a latent, though untouched, tenderness; of her caprices, of her
changefulness, of her moods of contempt and of impatience, he had no fear
he would substitute other emotions for them. And yet he hesitated; he was
unresolved; he was doubtful whether to accept the empire he had obtained.

He would have concluded a marriage of interest as coldly and tranquilly
as any other man with a woman to whom he was indifferent. But with this
woman whose mere touch thrilled him to the heart, and whose imperious
eyes had only grown gentle for his sake!—never had he felt his poverty so
painfully as in this moment when supreme Fortune seemed to have smiled
upon him.

Though he loved her with passion, he almost wished that he had never seen
her face.

After all, though generous, she was arrogant: sooner or later she might
make him feel that the golden sceptre was hers and not his. To his
temper, which, although gentle, was deeply ingrained with the pride which
had been transmitted to him from many generations of a feudal nobility,
such a possibility seemed unendurable. He sat still lost in thought till
his lamp grew low, and the wind, rising loud, shook the leaded panes of
the old high windows.

“I suppose when Fortune does smile at us we always quarrel with her so,”
he thought, with some impatience of his own irresolution.

After all, what other man in Europe would not have been content?

He got up, caressed the dog, turned the lamp higher, and went into his
bed-chamber.

“Get out the white mousquetaire dress,” he said to his old servant. “I
will go to the Roubleskoff ball.”

All patrician Floralia was at the Roubleskoff ball, one of the last
great entertainments of the moribund Carnival. In six more days there
would come the Day of Ashes; and Floralia would repent her sins in
sadness,—that is, with only musical parties, a dinner here and there, and
no suppers at all:—perhaps a ball might be squeezed in once or twice by
grace of the Russian calendar, but, then, if you took advantage of that
you were _brouillé_ with all the _codini_[2] at once.

He reached the Roubleskoff villa late, not so late but that he was in
time to see the arrival of the woman who had sat with him at her feet,
and talked with him of Meleager and the white narcissus flowers.

Lady Hilda entered like a sovereign, and drew all eyes on herself.

She was attired as Vittoria Colonna, and carried her purples and cloth of
gold with more than royal grace; the color on her cheek was heightened,
her eyes had a dewy brilliancy; what they spoke to her she seemed hardly
to hear.

He was as her shadow all the evening.

They were both curiously happy; both curiously troubled. Neither cared to
look onward.

Society there assembled said that it was a great thing for the Duca della
Rocca; and wondered whether they would live most in Floralia or Paris.

“C’est moi qui a inspiré cela,” said the Duc de St. Louis, with much
self-complacency, sitting down to the whist-table; he was quite sure that
all was right; he had seen the look in the eyes of both of them.

“She will compromise herself at last. Oh, what a comfort it will be!”
thought little Madame Mila, carrying her frigate in full sail airily
through the mazes of the cotillon with a sleeveless bodice on, cut so low
that it was really as good—or as bad—as if she had had nothing at all.
She did not wish any harm, of course, only, really, Hilda, with a lover
like other people, would be so much more natural and agreeable.

“But they will marry, people say,” suggested M. des Gommeux, to whom
alone she confided these ideas.

“When do people ever say anything that is true?” said Madame Mila,
with profound contempt, tossing her little head till the Naval Power
of England was in jeopardy. She was irritated to hear Maurice even
talk about marriage; it was an improper thing for him even to mention,
considering his relation to herself. When he approached any young girl or
marriageable woman of any sort, Madame Mila bristled like a little angry
terrier that sees a cat; on the whole, she was still more exacting than
Mlles. Rose Thé and Boulotte, and whereas in society he could escape from
them, he could in no wise escape from her.

If it had been a question of marriage for her cousin, indeed, Madame
Mila would have opposed it tooth and nail; she had a feeling, a very
acute one, that Della Rocca did not approve of herself, and that he would
certainly never allow his wife, if he had one, to be very intimate with
her. But Madame Mila knew what other people did not,—that there could be
no question of such a marriage for her cousin; and so she smiled on Della
Rocca, and was always engaging him to dinner; because Lady Hilda, with
her lover about her, like any one else, would be so much more humanized
and natural, and would sympathize so much better with other people.

That kind of virtue of Hilda’s—if it were virtue—was such an odd, chilly,
unpleasant thing, she thought; to live in that way, with hundreds of men
seeking her, and cold alike to them all, was something so very unnatural;
it was almost as bad as being one of those queer women who wouldn’t tie
their skirts back, or wear high heels, or dress their hair properly:—it
was so strange, too, in a person who in all other matters was the very
queen of fashion, the very head and front of the most perfect worldliness.

It was very late, and daylight quite, when Lady Hilda, contrary to her
custom, left the ball; she had been happy with a warmth and feverishness
of happiness altogether new to her; nothing more had passed between them,
but they had been together all the night, although never alone.

She stood a moment in the door-way, facing the daylight. Most women are
ruined by such a test; she looked but the more beautiful with the sunrise
flush touching her cheek, and the pearls in her bosom, and the diamonds
in her hair.

“I may come to you early?” he murmured, as she paused that instant on the
step.

“Yes,—no. No: I shall be tired. Wait till the evening. You are coming to
Mila.”

The words were a denial; but on her lips there was sweetness, and in her
eyes a soft emotion, as she moved onward and downward to the carriage.

He was not dissatisfied or dismayed. As he drew the furs over her
gold-laden skirts, his head bore lower and lower, and his lips touched
her hand and her arm.

“The sun is up. I never am so late as this,” she said, as though she did
not feel those kisses; but, by the clear light of the day-dawn, he saw
the blood mantle over her throat and bosom, and the tremulous shadow of a
smile move her mouth.

The horses sprang forward; he stood on the lower step, grave and lost in
thought.

“Is it too early to offer felicitations, my friend?” said the Duc de St.
Louis, pausing for an instant as he passed out to go homeward; he had
been playing whist all night.

“I do not understand you,” he answered, with the tranquil falsehood of
society.

The question annoyed him deeply. He loved this woman with all the
tenderness and passion of his temperament, and loved her the more for
the ascendency he had gained over her and the faults that he saw in her;
he loved her generously, truly, and with purer desire than most men. Yet
what would his love for her ever look to the world?—since he was poor.

The Lady Hilda, with her fair hair tumbled about her pillows, and her
gorgeous cloth of gold lying on a couch like a queen’s robes abandoned,
went home and slept restlessly, yet with a smile on her face, some
few hours: when she awoke it was with a smile, and with that vague
sweet sense of awakening to some great joy, which is one of the most
precious gifts of happiness, a dreamful misty sense of expectation and
recollections blending in one, and making the light of day beautiful.

She lay still some time, awake, and yet dreaming with half-closed
eyelids, and her thick hair loosened and covering her shoulders, and the
sweet scent close at hand of a glassful of calycanthus and myrtle, that
she had been very careful to tell them to set near her bed. Lazily, after
awhile, she rang a little bell, and bade her maids open her shutters. The
grand light of the noonday poured into the chamber.

“Give me a mirror,” she said to them.

When they gave her one, she looked at herself and smiled again: she was
one of those women who are lovely when they wake: there are not many.

They brought her her chocolate, and she sipped a little of it, and lay
still, looking at the violets and hearing the ringing of church-bells
from across the water: she was happy; it seemed to her that all her life
before had not been happiness, after all; only pleasure.

An hour later her maid brought her a telegram. She opened it with a
little impatience. Why should anything break in on her day-dream?

It merely said that her brother was in Paris, and would come onward, and
be with her that night. She let the paper fall, as though she were stung
by an adder.

It recalled to her what she had forgotten.




CHAPTER X.


Lord Clairvaux arrived in time for Madame Mila’s dinner. He was an
affectionate and sunny-tempered man; he did not notice that his sister
did not once say she was glad to see him.

Della Rocca did notice it, with that delicate unerring Italian
perception, which is as fine as a needle and as subtle as mercury.

He saw, too, that something had come over her,—some cloud, some change;
she had lost much of her proud serenity, and she looked at him now and
then with what seemed to him almost like contrition; she avoided being
alone with him; he was troubled at it, but not alarmed; he knew very well
that she loved him. He let her be.

An Italian has infinite passion, but he has also infinite patience in
matters of love. Nor was he, now that he was assured of his power over
her, wholly content to use it: if he married her, the world would always
say that it was for her wealth. That means of raising his own fortunes,
which had seemed to him so material and legitimate all his life, now
seemed to him unworthy and unmanly since he had grown to care for her. He
knew that such riches as she possessed were precisely those with which
he had always intended to rebuild the fallen greatness of his race; but
since he had loved her it looked very different.

The charm of their intercourse to him was the ascendency he had won over
her, the power that he had gained to lift her nature to a higher level:
where would his influence be when he had once stooped to enrich himself
by its means?

These fancies saddened him and checked him, and made him not unwilling to
linger on about her, in all that indistinct sweetness of half-recognized
and half-unspoken love.

The position, uncertain as it was, had its charm: he felt that this
woman, with all her insolence and indifference and absorption by the
world, was, in his hands, only a creature of emotions and of passions,
who would flush at his touch and grow unnerved under his gaze; he knew
that he was very dear to her, since had it not been for the audacity of
his caresses he would have been driven out of her presence.

“Ama chi t’ama e lascia dir la gente,” he said to himself, in the wise
burden of the people’s love-song; and he let destiny go as it would.

Meanwhile, she, dissatisfied, with a conscience ill at ease, and
disinclined to look into the future, saw him morning, noon, and night,
but avoided seeing him alone, and usually had her brother near.

Lord Clairvaux could only stay a week, and was utterly unconscious that
his presence was unwelcome; he was taken to see the two Arab mares of
Della Rocca; he was taken to Palestrina; he was taken to studios and
chapels, which had no more interest for him than they would have had for
a setter dog: but he was quite ignorant of why he was taken.

He did what Lady Hilda told him to do; he always did when he and
she were together; he was a simple, kindly, honest gentleman; who
regarded England as the universe, and all the rest of the world as a
mere accident. His sister’s contempt for her country and his politics,
her philosophy of indifferentism, her adoration of primitive art, her
variable disdain, and her intellectual pharisaism had always seemed to
him very wonderful, and not altogether comfortable; but he admired her
in a hopeless kind of way, and it was not in his temper to puzzle over
people’s differences of opinion or character.

“Hilda thinks all the old dead fellows were gods, and she thinks all of
us asses,” he would say, humbly. “I don’t know, you know: she’s awfully
clever. I never was. It may be so; only I never will believe that England
is used up, as she says; and I like the east wind myself; and what she
can see in those saints she’s just bought, painted on their tiptoes, or
in those old crooked pots;—but if she’d stayed in the country, and hunted
twice a week all winter, you know she would not have been like that.”

“It would have been a great pity had Miladi been anything save what she
is,” said Della Rocca, to whom he expressed himself in this manner, in
such French as he could command, and who was amused and astonished by
him, and who took him a day’s wild-fowl-shooting in the marshes, and a
day’s wild-boar-hunting in the next province, and wondered constantly why
so kindly and gallant a gentleman should have been made by the good God
so very stupid.

“Oh, you think so; I don’t,” said Lord Clairvaux. “Hilda isn’t my idea
of a happy woman. I don’t believe she is happy. She spends half her
life thinking how she will dress herself; and why will they dress now
like the ruffs and things of Queen Elizabeth, and the effigies on the
tombstones? and the other half she spends buying things she never looks
at, and ordering things she dislikes when they’re done, and reading books
that make her think her own countrymen are a mere lot of blockheads and
barbarians. Not that I pretend to understand her; I never did; only
I think if she didn’t think everybody else such a fool she’d be more
comfortable.”

Della Rocca smiled.

“Pardon me, you will disturb the birds.”

Lord Clairvaux recollected that he ought not to talk of his sister to a
stranger, and, bringing his gun to his shoulder, fired into a covey of
wild ducks.

“What a handsome fellow that is!—like an old picture,” he thought to
himself, as he looked at Della Rocca, who sat in the prow of the boat;
but he did not connect him in his thoughts with Lady Hilda in any way:
for ten years he had got so tired of vainly wondering why this man and
that did not please her, and had been made so vexed and perplexed by her
rejection of the Prince of Deutschland, that he had ceased to think of
her as a woman who could possibly ever care for anybody.

One night, however, when he had been there five days, he was walked about
in the crowd of the Veglione by little Madame Mila, masked, and draped
as black as a little beetle; and Madame Mila, who was getting tired of
things standing still, and could no more help putting her tiny finger
into all kinds of pasties, and making mischief in a kittenish way, than
she could help going on enameling since she had once begun it, laughed
at him, teased him, and told him what startled him.

“But she isn’t here, and he is!” he gasped, feebly, in protest at what he
had heard, gazing over the motley crowd.

“What a goose you are!—as if that showed anything! They can meet much
better than in this place,” said Madame Mila, with a saucy laugh.

He turned on her with a heavy frown.

“Hang it, Mila! you don’t dare to mean——”

Madame Mila was frightened in an instant.

“Oh, dear, no; of course not; only I do assure you they’ve been always
together ever since I’ve been in Floralia. I thought you knew——”

“Damn it, no!” he muttered. “I beg your pardon; I never see anything; I
mean, I’m quite sure there’s nothing to see.”

“Well, ask her,” said Madame Mila: then she added, sweetly, “You know I’m
so fond of dear Hilda; and people do talk so horridly here for nothing at
all; and Italians are not so scrupulous as _we_ are.”

He went home in haste, and was told that Miladi had retired to bed full
two hours before. In the morning he sent to ask when he could see her.
She sent back word that she should be happy to see him at breakfast at
twelve. At ten he received a telegram from his wife asking him to return,
because his eldest boy, Cheviot, was unwell, and they feared typhoid
fever.

“Damn it all, what a worry!” said Lord Clairvaux to himself, and then
went out and smoked on the bank of the river, and looked over the stone
parapet moodily.

“Bon-jour, monsieur,” a soft and melodious voice said, passing him.

Della Rocca was driving past with a fiery little horse on his way to
Palestrina. Lord Clairvaux felt inclined to stop the horse; but what
could he say if he did?

What a nuisance it was, he thought; but what could go right in a country
where they shot their foxes, and called their brushes tails, and hung
them under the ears of cart-mules and ponies?—a country where they
treated the foxes as they did, to say nothing of the Holy Father, must be
a land of malediction.

He smoked through two great cigars, and walked about the town unhappily,
and when it was noon went up-stairs to his sister. He did not dare to go
a moment before the time.

“Dear Freddie, is it you?” said the Lady Hilda, listlessly; she looked
very lovely and very languid, in a white cashmere morning gown, with a
quantity of lace about it, and her hair all thrown back loosely and tied
like the Venere alla Spina’s.

“I have to go away by the night train. Poor little Cheviot’s ill,” he
said, disconsolately, as he took her hand; he never ventured on kissing
her; years before she had taught him that such endearments were very
ridiculous and disagreeable.

“Dear me! I am very sorry. Will you have coffee, or tea, or wine?” she
asked, absently, as she went to the table where the breakfast was.

“Chevy’s very ill,” said Lord Clairvaux, who thought she showed small
sympathy. “You used to like Chevy.”

“He was a pretty little child. I hate boys.”

“You wouldn’t if you had them of your own,” said Lord Clairvaux, and
grumbled inaudibly as he took some cutlets.

Lady Hilda colored a little.

“I have really not imagination enough to follow you. Will you have
coffee? I hope it’s nothing serious with Cheviot?”

“Fever, his mother thinks: any way, I must go. I saw your friend the Duca
della Rocca this morning: he was out early.”

He thought this was approaching the subject in a masterly manner.

“Italians always rise early,” said the Lady Hilda, giving him his cup.

“And he was at the Veglione last night——”

“All Italians go to the Veglione.”

“You have seen a great deal of him, haven’t you?” asked Lord Clairvaux,
looking at her across the table, and thinking how pretty all that white
was which she had on, and what a difficult person she was to begin
anything with; he had never felt so nervous since the time when he had
been called on as a young man to move the Address when Parliament opened.

“One sees a great deal of everybody in a small society like this.”

“Because, you know, people talk about you and him: so they say, at least.”

“They are very good, whoever they are: who are they?”

“Who?—Oh, I don’t know; I heard so.”

“How very nice of you to discuss me with other people!”

Lord Clairvaux cast a glance at her, and was very much frightened at the
offense he saw in her contemptuous face. How pale she was looking, too,
now he thought of it! and she had shadows underneath her eyes quite new
to her.

“What sort of a fellow is he?” he muttered. “He seemed a duffer to
me about his fields,—such plows, by heavens!—and such waste in the
stack-yards _I_ never saw. But it isn’t farming here at all; it’s letting
things go wild just anyhow——”

“It is not being wiser than Nature, and sacrificing all loveliness to
greed,—if you mean _that_,” said Lady Hilda, with coldest disdain. “The
life here has still the old Theocritan idyllic beauty, thank heaven.”

“Theocritus? Oh, I know; I never could construe him; but I do know a
straight furrow and decently-kept land when I see it. But I say, you
know, I don’t wish to be officious or anything, but do you think it’s
wise to see so very much of him? You know he’s an Italian, and I dare say
hasn’t a bit of principle, nor a penny in his pocket.”

The hazel eyes of the Lady Hilda flashed golden beams of wrath.

“How very grateful of you!—when he has entertained you to the best of his
ability, and went out of his way to find sport for you, very little to
his own pleasure, moreover, for I can assure you _his_ soul does not lie
in his gun-barrel!”

“I don’t want to say anything against him,” murmured Lord Clairvaux, who
was the most grateful and most just of mortals. “He was very kind and
courteous, and all that; and I don’t say he’s a bad shot,—though he’s
a bad farmer; and he is an awfully good-looking fellow, like an old
picture, and all that. Only I must go to-night, Hilda, and I do want to
speak to you.”

“You are speaking all this time, I believe,” said Lady Hilda, icily,
looking across at him with the coldest challenge in her darkening eyes.

“I never could think why you didn’t take Deutschland,” he muttered,
reverting to an old grievance.

“He didn’t please me. Is that all you wanted to say?”

“But I thought you’d have cared to be a reigning sovereign?”

“Of a small State?” said the Lady Hilda, with an eloquent lift of her
eyebrows.

“Well, there was De Ribeaupierre; he was everything anybody could want;
Vienna, too. I used to think an Ambassadress’s life would just suit you.”

“Always calling on people, and writing notes? No life on earth more
tiresome.”

“I suppose you want to be an Empress?”

“Oh, dear, no,” answered his sister. “I have known two Empresses
intimately; and it is a career of great tedium: you can never do what you
like.”

“Then I suppose you are content as you are?”

“I suppose so, if anybody ever is. I don’t think any one is. I never met
anybody who was. They say pigs are; but one sees so little of pigs that
one can’t make much psychological study of them.”

Lord Clairvaux grumbled, sighed, and took his courage _à deux mains_.

“Well, never mind the other men,—they are past and gone, poor wretches:
what do you mean to do about this one?”

“This what?” said Lady Hilda, looking languidly at him through the
flowers on the breakfast-table. She knew quite well what he meant.

“What do you mean to do with him?” repeated Lord Clairvaux, solemnly,
pushing his plate away. “It’s all very pretty, I dare say,—Romeo, and
moonlight, and poetry, and all that sort of thing; Italians are the deuce
and all for that: only I shouldn’t have thought you’d have cared for it;
and, besides, you know it can’t go on:—the man’s a gentleman, that I
grant; and, by heaven, that’s a great deal nowadays, such blackguards as
we’re getting,—three card scandals in the clubs already this very winter,
and George Orme’s was regular sharping, just what any cad might do, by
Jove! But you know you can’t go on with it; you can’t possibly mean it
seriously: now, do you?”

Lady Hilda laughed that little, cold, contemptuous laughter which her
brother always shivered under, and which Della Rocca had never heard.

“I don’t seriously mean to cheat at cards! My dear Frederic, you must
say what you mean, if you mean anything at all, a little more clearly,
please. Why will all Englishmen get their talk into such odd confusion? I
suppose it comes of never learning grammar at Eton.”

“Well, hang it, then, I’ll say it clearly,” retorted Clairvaux, with some
indignation. “Mila tells me you and this Italian that’s always after you
have taken a liking to one another: is it true?—and what do you mean to
do with him? There!”

He was horribly frightened when he had said it, but what he thought was
his duty, that he did: and he conceived it to be his duty to speak.

All the blood leaped into the fair face of the Lady Hilda, her nostrils
dilated in a fine anger, her lips grew pale.

“Mila is a little wretch!” she said, with strong passion; then was
still; she was too generous to quote her own generosity, or urge her
past gifts as present claims. “She is a little fool!” she added, with
bitter disdain. “And how can _you_ cheapen my name by listening to her
chattering folly? Besides, what have you to do with me?—or what has she?
I am not used to dictation, nor to interference.”

“Oh, I know,” said her brother, humbly. “And I beg your pardon, I am
sure, and all that;—only, just tell me, how will it end?”

“How will what end?”

“This fancy of yours.”

Lady Hilda grew very pale.

“My dear Clairvaux,” she said, with chilliest contempt, “you are not my
keeper, nor my husband, nor anything else, except one of my trustees. I
do not know that being a trustee gives you a title to be impertinent. You
really talk as you might to your game-keeper’s daughter if you thought
you saw the girl ‘going wrong.’ What M. Della Rocca feels for me, or I
for him, is merely sympathy in views and tastes. But if it were anything
else, whose business would it be?”

Lord Clairvaux laughed.

“Yes!—you are a likely creature to inspire friendship! As if there were
ever a woman worth looking at who could keep a man at _that_!—Don’t let
us fence about it, Hilda. Perhaps I haven’t any right to say anything;
you’re your own mistress, and all that, and answerable to nobody. Only,
can you deny that I am your brother?”

“I have always understood you were. I confess you make me regret the
circumstance.”

“Now, that’s ill-natured, very ill-natured,” he murmured, pathetically.
“But you won’t make me quarrel. There must be two to quarrel, and I won’t
be one. We have always been good friends, more than good friends. I
thought I was the only person on earth you did like——”

“And, like every one else, you consider that the liking you inspire
confers a privilege to be impertinent,” said his sister, with all that
disdainful anger flashing from her languid eyes, which none of her family
ever cared very much to meet.

She had risen from her chair, and was moving to and fro with a restless
controlled impatience. She remained very pale. Clairvaux kept his
position on the hearth-rug, with a dogged good humor and an uneasy
confusion blended together which, at any other time, would have diverted
her.

“Perhaps I may be impertinent,” he said, humbly, “though hang me if I can
see that that’s a natural sort of word to be used between a brother and
sister. I know you’re a mighty great lady, and ‘a law to yourself,’ as
some poet says, and never listen to anybody, and always go your own ways,
and all that; but still, if you never speak to me afterwards, I must say
what I want to say. This man is in love with you; it’s my belief you’re
in love with him,—Mila says so, and she knows. Now, granted that it is so
(if it isn’t, there’s nothing to be angry about),—what I say is, how do
you mean it to end? Will you marry him?”

Her face changed, flushed, and then grew pale again.

“Of course not! You know it is impossible!”

“Does he know why it is impossible?”

“No: why should he? Really, you do not know what you are talking about.
You are interfering in the most uncalled-for manner where there is not
the slightest necessity for any interference.”

“Then you are letting him fall in love with you in the dark, and when you
have had enough of the sport will throw him over?”

“You grow very coarse, Clairvaux. Oblige me by dropping the subject.”

“I didn’t know I was coarse. That is what you are going to do. You accept
all his court now, and then you’ll turn round on him some fine morning
and say you’ve had enough of it. At least, I can’t see what else you will
do,—since you cannot marry him. You’ll hardly lower yourself to Mila’s
level and all the other women’s,—by heavens, if I thought you would,
if I thought you had done, I’d soon see if this fellow were as fine a
swordsman as they say!”

Lady Hilda turned her face full on him.

“So my brother is the first person that ever dared to insult me?” she
said, with utmost coldness, as she rose from the breakfast-table and
swept his feet in passing with the lace that fringed the hem of her
cashmere robes.

She gave him one parting look, and left the chamber.

He stood cowed by the golden fire of those superb imperious hazel eyes.
He was nervous at what he had done, and unhappy and perplexed. He stood
alone, pulling at his fair beard, in troubled repentance. He knew what
her wrath would be. She was not a woman who quickly forgave.

“I’ve blundered; I always do blunder,” he thought sadly to himself. “She
must care awfully about him, to be so angry.”

He waited all alone many minutes. He was sincerely sorry; perhaps he
had been coarse; he had not meant to be; only, the idea of _her_ talked
about, and with lovers!—just like all those other women whom their
husbands or brothers ought to strangle: it was only fashion, they said,
only the way of the world, all that immorality;—“Damn the world,” he said
to himself, ruffling his beard in sad bewilderment.

He scribbled a trite, rough, penitent note, and sent it to her by her
maid. They brought him a closed envelope: when he opened it he found only
his own note inside,—sent back without any word.

Honest Clairvaux’s eyes filled with tears.

“She’ll never see me again before I go to-night,” he thought to himself,
tossing his poor little rejected morsel into the wood fire. “And I must
go to-night, because of poor little Chevy. How horrid it is!—I couldn’t
be angry like that with her!”

He stood some moments more, knitting his fair fresh forehead, and wishing
that he were less stupid in managing things; he had never in his life
before presumed to condemn and counsel his sister; and this was the
result!

Suddenly an idea struck him, and he rose.

“I will tell him,” he thought. “I will tell him himself. And then I shall
see what sort of stuff he is made of;—I can fight him afterwards if he
don’t satisfy me;—I’ll tell him as if I suspected nothing;—I can make an
excuse, but when he hears it he’ll show what he’s made of. Oh, Lord, if
it were only an Englishman she’d taken a liking to!—and to think that
she’s treated half the best men in Europe as if they were only so many
stones under her feet!”

With a groan, Lord Clairvaux took up his hat, and went forth towards the
Palazzo della Rocca.

At six o’clock that evening he had to take his departure without seeing
his sister again. He went away with a heavy heart.

“How extraordinary she is!” he thought. “Never even to ask me if I told
the man anything or not. And never to bid one good-by! Well, I’ve done
it for the best: I can’t help it. She’ll be sorry if poor little Chevy
should die.”

But the boy did not die; so that his father never learned whether that
event would have touched the heart of Lady Hilda or not.

All the following day she shut herself up in her rooms. She said she was
ill; and, in truth, she felt so. Della Rocca called three times in the
day, but she did not see him; he sent up a great bouquet of the pale
yellow tea-rose of which she was so fond; he had fastened the flowers
together with an antique silver zone on which was the Greek Love in
relief,—the Love of the early Hellenic poets, without wings and with a
mighty sword, the Love of Anacreon, which forges the soul as a smith his
iron, and steeps it in icy waters, after many blows.

She understood the message of the Love, but she sent no message back.

It was a lovely day; underneath the windows the carriages were rolling;
there was the smile of spring on the air as the fleecy clouds went
sailing past; she could see the golden reaches of the river and the
hyacinth-hued hills where Palestrina lay; her heart was heavy; her pulse
was quick; her conscience was ill at ease; her thoughts were restless
and perturbed. Solitude and reflection were so new to her; they appalled
her. When she had been unwell before, which had been but seldom, she
had always beguiled herself by looking over the jewels in their cases,
sorting rare old Marcantonios and Morghens, skimming French feuilletons,
or planning new confections for her vast stores of old laces. But now
none of these distractions were possible to her; she sat doing nothing,
weary, feverish, and full of a passionate pain.

The fact which her brother had told to Della Rocca was, that if she
married again all her riches would pass away from her.

At the time of her marriage her father had been deeply involved in
debt; gambling, racing, and debts of every other kind had been about
him like spiders’ webs; the great capitalist, Vorarlberg, had freed
him on condition of receiving the hand of his young daughter in
exchange. She was allowed to know nothing of these matters; but under
such circumstances it was impossible for the family to be exacting
as regarded settlements: she was abandoned entirely to the old man’s
power. Fortunately for herself, he was taken ill on the very day of
the nuptials, and, after a lingering period of suffering, died, leaving
her mistress of half of one of the finest fortunes in Europe. By birth
he was a Wallachian Jew, brought up in London and Paris, but he had
been naturalized in England, when a youth, for commercial objects, and
the disposition of his property lay under his own control. A year or
two after his death a later testament was found by his lawyers, still
leaving her the same wealth, but decreeing that in the event of her
second marriage everything should pass away from her to the public
charities, save alone her jewels, her horses, all things she might have
purchased, the house in Paris, which had been a gift, and some eight
hundred a year already secured to her. The new will was proved, and she
was informed that she would enjoy her fortune only by this tenure. She
was indifferent. She was quite sure that she would never wish to marry
any one. She loved her wealth and spent it magnificently; and when men
whose own position would have made the loss of her own money of no moment
sued at her feet, she still repulsed them, thinking always, “Le mieux est
l’ennemi du bien.”

The fact of this later will was scarcely known beyond the precincts of
the law and the circle of their own family; but since she had met Della
Rocca, the remembrance of it had kept her awake many a night, and broken
roughly many a day-dream.

To surrender her fortune to become his wife never once occurred to her
as possible. Ten years’ enjoyment of her every whim had made it seem so
inalienably hers. She could no more face the loss of her fortune than
she could have done that of her beauty.

She had entered so early into her great possessions that they had
grown to be a very part of her. The old man who had been her husband
but in name was but a mere ghostly shadow to her. The freedom and the
self-indulgence she had so long enjoyed had become necessary to her as
the air she breathed.

It was not the mere vulgar vaunt or ostentation of wealth that had
attraction for her; it was all the supremacy, the ease, the patronage,
the habits, that great wealth alone makes possible; it was the reign
which she had held throughout Europe; it was the charm of perfectly
irresponsible power. To give up these and hear the cackle of all the
fools she had eclipsed mocking at her weakness! It would be beyond all
endurance.

What was she to do?

The lax moralities of the women of her time were impossible to her
proud and loftier character; and, besides, she felt that a woman who
preferred the world to him would not find in Della Rocca a forgiving or a
submissive lover. When he knew, what would he say?

She turned sick at the thought. After all, she had played with him and
deceived him: he would have just cause of passionate reproach against
her. His love had no wings, but it had a sword.

“Will Miladi be able to dine?” her maid asked her, vaguely alarmed at her
strange stillness and the great paleness of her face.

“Was I to dine anywhere?” she said, wearily.

She was to dine at the Archduchess Anna’s. The Archduchess Anna was
passing through Floralia after three months at Palermo for health, and
was staying in strict _incognita_, and infinite glee, as the Countess
Von Feffers, at the Hotel del Rè; enjoying herself endlessly, as the
gay-hearted lady that she was, even indulging once in the supreme delight
of driving in a cab, and with no other recognition of her great rank than
consisted in the attendance upon her of the handsomest of the king’s
chamberlains.

“Dress me, then,” said Lady Hilda, with a sigh. She could not excuse
herself to the archduchess, whom she had known intimately for years, and
who was to leave Floralia in a week.

“What dress does Madame select?” asked her maid.

“Give me any you like,” she answered them.

She did not care how she would look; she would not meet him; she knew
that he had no acquaintance with the imperial lady.

The maids, left to themselves, gave her the last new one from Worth,—only
six days arrived; a dress entirely white, with knots of purple velvet,
exactly copied from a picture of Boucher’s, and with all the grace of
dead Versailles in its folds. She put a rococo necklace on, with a
portrait of Maria Theresa in it, and went listlessly to the dinner; she
was not thinking about her appearance that night, or she would have said
that she was too pale to wear all that white.

“Goodness me, Hilda, how ill you do look!” said Madame Mila, meeting her
on the stairs, and who was going also.

“No, thanks, I won’t drive with you; two women can’t go in a carriage
without one being _chiffonnée_. That’s an exquisite toilette; that white
brocade is delicious,—stamped with the lilies of France,—very pretty;
only you’re too pale for it to-night, and it’s a pity to wear it only for
the archduchess. She never knows what anybody’s got on their backs. Is
anything the matter, dear?”

“Nothing in the world.”

“Then you must have got a headache. You certainly do look very ill. I
do so hope we shall get away in time for the Veglione. It’s the very
last night, you know. I had such fun last time. I _intrigué’d_ heaps of
people, and Doggendorff I drove wild; I told him everything about his
wife and Lelio Castelpucci, and all against himself that she’d ever told
me. It was such fun: he’d not an idea who I was, for when we were at
supper he came running in breathless to tell us of a horrible little mask
with a voice like a macaw’s;—you know I’d put a pebble under my tongue.”

“Very dangerous pastime, and a very vulgar one,” said the Lady Hilda,
descending the staircase. “How can you go down into that horrible
screeching mob, Mila? It is so very low.”

“My dear, I go anywhere to amuse myself, and Maurice was always near me,
you know, so if I had been insulted—— There’s eight o’clock striking.”

The Hotel del Rè was but ten minutes’ drive along the famous
river-street, which has such an Arabian-Nights-like beauty when the
lamps are lighted, and gleam in long lines adown each shore, and mirror
themselves in the water, whilst dome and bell-tower and palace-roof raise
themselves darkly against the steel-blue sky of the night.

The archduchess had been spending a long day in the galleries, studying
art under the guidance of the handsome chamberlain; she was hungry,
happy, and full of the heartiest spirits; she was a very merry and
good-natured person, about five-and-forty years old, fat and fair, very
badly dressed, and very agreeable, with a frank laugh, and a strong love
of humor; she had had more escapades than any princess in Europe, and had
smoked more cigars than a French newspaper-writer, and had married more
daughters to German cousins than anybody else in the Almanach de Gotha.

Had she been any lesser being, Society would have turned its back on
her; but, being who she was, her nod was elevation, and her cigar ash
honor;—and, to do her justice, she was one of the most amiable creatures
in all creation.

“Ma chère, you are lovelier than ever!—and how do you like this
place?—and is the dear little pug alive? I lost my sweet Zaliote of
asthma in Palermo,” said the archduchess, welcoming the Lady Hilda, as
she did everything, with ardor.

Lady Hilda, answering, felt her colorless cheeks grow warm: in the circle
standing round she recognized Della Rocca. The archduchess had taken a
fancy to the look of him in the street, and had bidden the chamberlain
present him, and then had told him to come to dinner: she liked to
surround herself with handsome men. From Madame Mila he had learned in
the morning that her cousin would dine there at night.

Madame Mila concluded in her own mind that Freddie had had a row with
his sister upon the matter, but that Della Rocca had had nothing said
to him about it by either of them. Madame Mila concluded also that Hilda
had grown sensible, and was doing like other women; though why she looked
so ill about it, Madame Mila could not imagine. Madame Mila did not
comprehend scruples.

It was very painful, for instance, to be allied to any one of the Greek
Church, and a great grief to the Holy Father; but still it was very nice
to be married to a schismatic, because it enabled you to go to balls a
fortnight longer: if it was still your husband’s carnival, you know,
nobody could say anything.

Madame Mila thought you should always do your best to please everybody,
but then you should take care that you pleased yourself first most of
all. The world was easy enough to live in if you did not worry: there
were always unpaid bills to be sure, and they were odious. But then Hilda
never had any unpaid bills; so she never could have anything to annoy her.

Apropos of bills, she hoped Della Rocca would not use his influence with
her cousin so as to prevent her paying other people’s bills. Of course he
wouldn’t do this just as present; but when men had been lovers a little
while, they always turned the poetry into prose, and grew very nearly as
bad as husbands.

Madame Mila watched them narrowly all through dinner.

“If I thought he’d make her stingy, I’d make her jealous of Giulia
Malatesta to-morrow,” she thought to herself. Madame Mila on occasion had
helped or hindered circumstance among her friends and enemies with many
ingenious little devices, and lucky little anonymous notes, and other
innocent shifts and stratagems. It was no use being in the world at all
unless you interfered with the way it went: to be a mere puppet in the
hands of Fate, with the strings of accident dangling to and fro, seemed
to her clever little brain quite unworthy the intelligence of woman.

She never meant to do any harm,—oh, never; only she liked things to go
as she wished them. Who does not? If a few men and women had been made
wretched for life, and people who loved one another devotedly had been
parted forever, and suspicion and hatred crept into the place of trust
and tenderness in certain households, Madame Mila could not help that,
any more than one can help other people being splashed with mud when one
drives down a lane in bad weather. And nobody ever thought Madame Mila
could do any harm,—pretty, good-natured, loquacious little Madame Mila,
running about with her little rose-buds at fancy fairs, and saying, so
sweetly, “Pour nos pauvres,—pour nos chers pauvres!”

“The best little woman in the world,” as everybody said,—Madame Mila
would kiss her female enemies on both cheeks wherever she met them,
and when she had sent an anonymous letter (for fun), always sent an
invitation to dinner just after it, to the same direction.

“I wish I knew how it is really between them,” she thought at the
archduchess’s dinner-table, divided between her natural desire to see her
cousin let fall that “white flower of a blameless life,” which stinks as
garlic in the nostrils of those who have it not, and her equally natural
apprehension that Paolo della Rocca as a lover would not let his mistress
pay other persons’ debts, and would also be sure to see all her letters.

“She’ll tell him everything about everybody,” thought Madame Mila,
uncomfortably; for Della Rocca had a look in his eyes of assured
happiness, which, to the astute experience of Madame Mila, suggested
volumes.

Meantime she was also harassed by the apprehension that she would not be
able to withdraw in time for the Veglione, where Maurice, a baignoir, and
a supper-table awaited her. If the archduchess should sit down to play of
any sort, hope was over, escape would be impossible till day-dawn; and
Madame Mila hated playing with the archduchess; she was afraid to cheat,
and was obliged to pay.

With all the ingenuity, therefore, of which she was mistress, she
introduced the idea of the Veglione into the mind of her hostess, and
so contrived to fascinate her with the idea that the archduchess, who
had gone in her time to five hundred public masked balls, was as hotly
animated into a desire to go to this one as though she had been just let
out of a convent at eighteen years old.

Madame Mila delightedly placed her baignoir at the disposition of her
imperial highness, and her imperial highness invited all her guests to
accompany her. Such invitations are not optional; and Lady Hilda, who
hated noise as her horses hated masks, was borne off by the mirthful,
chattering, and gay-hearted lady, who had no objection to noise, and
loved fun and riot like a street-boy.

Lady Hilda thought a veglione, and a liking for it, both beneath
contempt; yet she was not unwilling to avoid all chance of being alone
with Della Rocca even for a moment. She knew what he would say: his eyes
had said it all the evening a thousand times.

The Archduchess Anna and Madame Mila were both in the very highest
spirits; they had taken a good deal of champagne, as ladies will, and
had smoked a good deal and got thirsty, and had more champagne with some
seltzer water, and the result was the highest of high spirits. Nothing
could be more appropriate to a veglione.

As no reasonable being could stay by choice in one for an hour, it is
strongly advisable that reason should be a little dethroned by a very
dry wine before entering the dingy paradise. Of course nobody ever sees
great ladies “the worse for wine:” they are only the better, as a Stilton
cheese is.

Happy and hilarious, shrouded and masked beyond all possibility of
identification, and ready for any adventure, the Archduchess Anna was no
sooner in the box than she was out of it, and declared her intention of
going down into the crowd. Madame Mila, only too glad, went with her, and
some half-dozen men formed their escort. Lady Hilda excused herself on
the plea of a headache,—a plea not untrue,—and, alone with the Duc de St.
Louis, awaited the return of her hostess. She had only put on her mask
for entry, and had now laid it beside her; she threw aside her domino,
for the heat of the box was stifling, and the whiteness of her dress
shone as lilies do at moonlight. She leaned her cheek on her hand, and
looked down on to the romping, screaming, many-colored throng.

“You are not well to-night, madame?” said the Duc, with the affectionate
solicitude that he felt for all pretty women.

He was puzzled as to how her relations could stand with Della Rocca: the
previous night he had thought everything settled, but now he did not feel
quite so sure.

“The archduchess is so noisy; it always gives me a headache to dine with
her,” said Lady Hilda. “She is very good-natured, but her talking is——!”

“She is an admirable heavy dragoon, _manqué_,” said the Duc. “Most
good-natured, as you say, but trying to the tympanum and the taste. So
Clairvaux left last night?”

“Yes: Cheviot was taken ill.”

“I should have thought it was a racer taken ill, by the consternation he
seemed to be in. I saw him for a moment only.”

She was silent, watching the whirling of the pierrots, harlequins,
scaramouches, and dominoes, who were shrieking and yelling in the throng
below.

“I think he liked his shooting with Paolo?” said the Duc, at a hazard.

“He likes shooting anywhere.”

“Certainly there is something wrong,” thought the Duc, stooping a little
to look at her brocaded white lilies. “What an exquisite toilette!—is one
permitted to say so?”

“Oh, dear, no!” said the Lady Hilda, petulantly. “The incessant talk
about dress is so tiresome and so vulgar: the women who want their
costumes praised are women who have only just begun to dress tolerably
and are still not quite sure of the effects.”

“You are right, as always,” said the Duc, with a little bow and a little
smile. “But now and then perfection surprises us into involuntary
indiscretion. You must not be too severe.”

“Somebody should be severe,” she said, contemptuously. “Society is a
Battle of the Frogs, for rivality in dress and debt.”

The Duc laughed.

“What do you know about it, madame,—you who are as above rivals as above
debts? By the way, you told me you wanted some old Pesaro vases. I found
some yesterday at Biangini’s shop that might please you; they come out
of an old pharmacy in Verona,—perhaps the very pharmacy of Romeo’s
apothecary; and there are some fine old pots too——”

“I am tired of buying things.”

“The weariness of empire!—nothing new. You must take to keeping hens
and chickens, as the Emperor John Vatices did. How does Camille Odissôt
succeed with your ball-room frescoes?”

“I have no idea. Very ill, I dare say.”

“Yes, it is a curious thing that we do not succeed in fresco. The
grace is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of
touch necessary; they are used to masses of color, and they use the
palette-knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature
of our time, is all detail: the grand suggestive vagueness of the
Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes is lost to us under a crowd of
elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be
spiritual or tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks
knew neither domesticity nor melodrama, and the early Italian painters
were imbued with a faith which, if not so virile as the worship of the
Phidian Zeus, yet absorbed them and elevated them in a degree impossible
in the tawdry Sadduceeism of our own day. By the way, when the weather
is milder you must go to Orvieto; you have never been there, I think; it
is the Prosodion of Signorelli. What a fine Pagan he was at heart! He
admired masculine beauty like a Greek; he must have been a singularly
happy man,—few more happy——”

The Duc paused as the handle of the door turned; he was only talking
because he saw that she was too weary or too languid to talk herself; the
door opened, and Della Rocca entered the box again, having escaped from
the archduchess.

“We were speaking of Orvieto; you know more of it than I do. I was
telling Miladi that she must go there about Easter-time,” said the Duc,
hunting for his crush hat beneath the chair. “Take my seat, mon cher, for
a moment; I see Salvareo in the crowd, and I must speak to him about her
imperialissima’s supper. I shall be back in an instant.”

He departed, with no intention of returning, and was assailed in the
corridor by a party of masks, who bore him off gayly between them down
the staircase into the laughing, screaming, and capering multitude.

Della Rocca did not take his chair, but sank into the seat behind her,
while his hand closed on hers.

“Will you not even look at me?” he murmured.

She drew her hand away, and put her mask on, slipping its elastic round
her delicate ears.

“How the crowd yells!” she said, impatiently. “Will the archduchess stay
there long, do you think?”

With gentlest audacity and softest skill he had slipped off the mask and
had laid it behind him before she had realized what he was doing. His
hand had touched her as lightly as though a feather brushed a rose.

She rose in amazed anger, and turned on him coldly.

“M. della Rocca! how dare you presume so far? Give me my mask at once——”

“No,” he said, softly, and he took hold of her hands and drew her towards
the back of the box, where no eyes could reach them, and knelt down
before her as she sat there in the dusky shadow of the dark-red draperies.

“Oh, my love—my love!” he murmured; that was all; but his arms stole
about her, and his head drooped till his forehead rested on her knees.

For the moment she did not repulse him; she did not stir nor speak;
she yielded herself to the embrace, mute and very pale, and moved to a
strange tumult of emotion, whether of anger or of gladness she scarcely
knew.

He lifted his head, and his eyes looked into hers till her own could look
no longer.

“You love me?” he whispered to her, whilst his arms still held her
imprisoned.

She was silent; under the purple knot of velvet at her breast, he saw her
heart heave, her breath come and go; a hot color flushed over all her
face, then faded, and left her again pale as marble.

“It were of no use if—if I did,” she muttered. “You forget yourself.
Leave me.”

But he knelt there, looking at her till the look seemed to burn her like
flame; yet she did not rise,—she, the very hem of whose garment no man
before him had ever dared to touch.

“You love me!” he murmured, and said the same thing again and again and
again, in all the various eloquence of passion. She trembled a little
under his close caress; the dusky red of the box whirled around her; the
shouting of the multitude below beat like the sound of a distant sea on
her ears.

As he kneeled at her feet she touched his forehead one moment with her
hand in a gesture of involuntary tenderness.

“It is of no use,” she said, faintly, again. “You do not understand; you
do not know.”

“Yes, I do know,” he answered her.

“You know!”——

“Yes: your brother told me.”

“And yet?”——

“Since we love one another, is not that enough?”

She breathed like a person suffocated; she loosened herself from his
arms, and drew away from him, and rose.

“It makes no change in you, then!” she said, wonderingly, and looked at
him through a blinding mist, and felt sick and weary and bewildered, as
she had never thought it possible to feel.

“Change in me? What change? save that I am freer to seek you,—that is
all. Oh, my empress, my angel!—is not love enough? Has your life without
love contented you so well that you fear to face love alone?”

He still knelt at her feet, and kissed her hands and her dress, as he
spoke; he looked upward at the pale beauty of her face.

She shivered a little, as with cold.

“That is folly,” she muttered. “You must know it is of no use. I could
not live—poor.”

The word stung him: he rose to his feet; he was silent. After all, what
had he to offer her? he loved her: that was all.

She loosened the chain about her throat, and looked away beyond him
at the lights of the theatre. With an effort she recovered her old
indifferent cold manner.

“You have forgotten yourself: it is all folly: you must know that: you
surprised me into—weakness—for a moment. But it is over now. Give me my
mask, and take me to the carriage.”

“No!”—— He leaned against the door, and looked down on her: all the
rapture of expectancy and of triumph had faded from his face; the pallor
and suffering of a great passion were on it; he had known that she loved
the things of the world, but he had believed that she loved him more.

He was undeceived. He looked at this beautiful woman, with the gold chain
loosed about her throat, and the white brocaded lilies gleaming in the
gloom, and only by a supreme effort did he subdue the bitterness and
brutality which lie underneath all strong passions.

“One moment!” he said, as she moved to reach the door. “Can you say you
have no love for me?”

Her color varied.

“What is the use? Give me my mask.”

“Can you say you do not love me?”

She hesitated; she wished to lie, and could not.

“I did not say that,” she murmured. “Perhaps if things were different——
But as it is—it is no use.”

The half-confession sufficed: it loosened his lips to passionate appeal;
with all the eloquence natural to him and to his language, he poured
out on her all the supplication, all the entreaty, all the persuasion,
that he was master of; he lavished every amorous endearment that his
language held; he painted the joys of great and mutual love with a fervor
and a force that shook her like a whirlwind; he upbraided her with her
caprices, with her coldness, with her selfishness, till the words cut her
like sharp stripes; he besought her by the love with which he loved her,
till the voluptuous sweetness of it stole over all her senses, and held
her silent and enthralled.

He knelt at her feet, and held her hands in his.

“Does your life content you?” he said at the last. “Can greatness of
any sort content a woman without love? Can any eminence, or power, or
possession make her happiness without love? Say that I am poor,—that
coming to me you would come to what in your sight were poverty: is wealth
so great a thing measured against the measureless strength of passion?
Are not the real joys of our lives things unpurchasable? Oh, my love,
my love! If you had no preference for me, I were the vainest fool to
urge you; but, as it is, does the world that tires you, the society
that wearies you, the men and women who fatigue you, the adulation that
nauseates you, the expenditure that after all is but a vulgarity in your
sight, the acquisition that has lost its charm for you with long habit,
like the toys of a child,—are all those things so supreme with you that
you can send me from you for their sake? Is not one hour of mutual love
worth all the world can give?”

His arms held her close, he drew her down to him nearer and nearer till
his head rested on her breast and he felt the tumultuous throbbing of her
heart. For one moment of scarce conscious weakness she did not resist or
repulse him, but surrendered herself to the spell of his power. He moved
her as no mortal creature had ever had strength to do; a whole world
unknown opened to her with his touch and his gaze; she loved him. For one
moment she forgot all else.

But all the while, even in the temporary oblivion to which she had
yielded, she never dreamed of granting what he prayed.

The serenity and pride in her were shaken to their roots; she was humbled
in her own sight; she was ashamed of the momentary delirium to which
she had abandoned herself; she strove in vain to regain composure and
indifference: come what would, he was near to her as no other man had
ever been.

She drew her domino about her with a shudder, though the blood coursed
like fever in her veins.

“You must hate me,—or forget me,” she murmured, as she tried to
take her mask from his hand. “You _know_ it is no use. I could not
live—poor. Perhaps you are right; all those things are habits, follies,
egotisms,—oh, perhaps. But, such as they are,—such as I am,—I could never
live without them.”

He stood erect, and his face grew cold.

“That is your last word, madame?”

“Yes. What else should I say? No other”—her voice faltered a moment,
and grew very weak, “no other man will ever be anything to me, if that
content you. But more is impossible.”

He bowed low in silence, and gave her up her mask.

She felt afraid to look up at his face.

The door opened on them noisily; the archduchess and Madame Mila were
returning to refresh themselves with their supper ere descending again to
fresh diversions. Behind them came the Duc de St. Louis and all the men
of their party, and their servants with the trestles for the setting of
the table in their box.

They were fuller than ever of laughter, mirth, high spirits, and riotous
good humor; their white teeth shone under the lace of their loups, and
their eyes sparkled through the slits. They had frightened some people,
and teased more, and had been mistaken for two low actresses and jested
with accordingly, and were as much flattered as the actresses would have
been had they been taken for princesses.

The Lady Hilda prayed of the archduchess’s goodness to be excused from
awaiting the supper; she had been ill all day, and her headache was very
severe.

The archduchess was in too high spirits to listen very much, or to care
who went or who stayed.

“Take me to the carriage, Duc,” said Lady Hilda, putting her hand on the
arm of M. de St. Louis.

Della Rocca held the door open for her. He bowed very low, once more, as
she passed him.




CHAPTER XI.


The next day was Ash Wednesday.

Madame Mila awoke too late for mass, and with a feverish throbbing in
her temples. She and the archduchess had only left the Veglione as the
morning sun came up bright and tranquil over the shining waters of the
river from behind the eastern hills.

Madame Mila yawned and yawned again a score of times, drank a little
green tea to waken herself, thought how horrid Lent was, and ran over in
her mind how much she would confess at confession.

She determined to repent her sins very penitently. She would only go to
musical parties, she would wear no low bodices, she would eat fish twice
a week,—the red mullets were really very nice,—and she would go for all
Holy Week _en retraite_: if she did all that, the most severe monitor
could not require her to give up Maurice.

Poor Maurice! she smiled to herself, in the middle of a yawn; how devoted
he was!—he only lived on her breath, and if she dismissed him would
kill himself with absinthe. She really believed it. She did not dream
that Maurice, submissive slave though he was, had his consolations for
slavery, and was at that moment looking into the eyes of the prettiest
artist’s model in Floralia.

It was the Day of Ashes, as all the bells of the city had tolled out far
and wide; and Madame Mila, over her green tea, really felt penitent. For
the post had brought her three terribly thick letters, and the letters
were bills; and the sum total that was wanted immediately was some sixty
thousand francs; and how could a poor dear little woman who had spent all
her money send that, or a tenth of it? and Spiridion wouldn’t,—he had
too many bills of Blanche Souris’ to pay; and poor Maurice couldn’t,—he
invariably lost at play much more than he possessed, after the manner of
his generation.

Madame Mila really cried about it, and felt ready to promise any amount
of repentance if she could get those sixty thousand francs this Lent.

“And to think of me running myself off my feet in that muslin apron
collecting for the poor!” she thought, with a sense that heaven behaved
very ill to her in return for her charities. “I suppose I must ask
Hilda,” she reflected: “she always does give when you ask her,—if that
man don’t prevent her now.”

For the champagne and the mask and the great joyousness of her soul had
prevented Madame Mila from observing any difference between her cousin
and Della Rocca, and, as he had left the box immediately after her
cousin, she had supposed that they had gone away together: why shouldn’t
they?

“I must ask Hilda to lend it me,” she said to herself.

To say “lend” was agreeable to her feelings,—not, of course, that there
was any serious necessity to repay between such near relatives; and she
sent her maid across the corridor to inquire when she could come into her
cousin’s room.

The maid returned with a little unsealed note which the Lady Hilda had
desired should be given to Madame Mila when she should awake. The note
only said, “I am gone to Rome for some few weeks, dear: write to me at
the Iles Britanniques if you want anything.”

“Good gracious! what can have happened?” said Madame Mila, in utter
amaze. “They must have quarreled last night.” And she proceeded to
cross-examine all the hotel people.

Lady Hilda had left by the morning train, and had not taken her
carriage-horses with her, only the riding-horses, and had kept on her
rooms at the Murat: that was all they knew.

“She is very uncertain and uncomfortable to have to do with,” thought
Madame Mila, in vague irritation. “Anybody else would have asked me to go
with her.”

A sudden idea occurred to her, and she sent her maid to find out if the
Duca della Rocca were in Floralia.

At his palace they said that he was.

“Dear me! perhaps he’ll go after her,” thought Madame Mila. “But I don’t
know why she’s so secret about it, and takes such precautions. Nobody’d
cut her for anything she might do so long as she’s all that money; and so
long as she don’t marry she can’t lose it.”

Madame Mila didn’t understand it at all. Her experience in the world
assured her that her cousin might have Della Rocca, or anybody else,
constantly beside her whenever she liked, and nobody would say
anything,—so long as she had all that money.

She felt that she was badly treated, that there was something not
confided to her, and also she certainly ought to have been asked to go
to Rome at her cousin’s expense. She was sulky and irritated.

“Hilda is so queer and so selfish,” she said to herself, and began a
letter to the Iles Britanniques with many tender endearments and much
pathos, and the most gracefully-worded appeal possible for the loan of
the sixty thousand francs.

She would have gone to Rome herself, being well aware that written
demands are much more easily repulsed than spoken ones. But she had no
money at all. She had lost a quarter’s income at play since she had been
in the town, and she could not pay the hotel-people till her husband
should send her more money, and he was hunting bears on the Pic du Midi
with Blanche Souris, established at Pau, and when that creature was with
him he was always very tardy in answering letters for money, bears or no
bears, and of course he would make the bears his excuse now.

Fairly overwhelmed, poor little Madame Mila had a long fit of hysterics,
and her maids had to send in great haste for ether and the Vicomte des
Gommeux.

She rallied by dinner-time enough to eat two dozen oysters, some lobster
croquettes, and some prawn soup, with a nice little bottle of Veuve
Cliquot’s sweetest wine; but still things were very dreadful, and on
the whole she was in the proper frame of mind for the Day of Ashes, and
in the confessional next morning sobbed so much that her confessor was
really touched, and was not too severe with her about her Maurice.




CHAPTER XII.


In three weeks’ time Lady Hilda returned from Rome.

She had been affectionately received by the Holy Father; she had been the
idol of the nobles of the Black; she had bought a quantity of pictures
and marbles, and bronzes, and Castelani jewelry; she had gone to early
mass every day, and ridden hard every day; she had thought Totila would
have been more bearable than Signor Roso, and she had shuddered at the
scraped walls of the Colosseum and the crimson bedaubings of the Palace
of the Cæsars.

She returned contemptuous, disgusted, tired of the age she lived in,
and regretful that she had not spared herself the sight of so much
desecration. She conceived that Genseric or the Constable de Bourbon must
have been much less painful than a syndicate and an army of bricklayers.
She refused to go out anywhere, on the score of its being Lent, and she
meditated going to London for the season to that very big house in Eaton
Square, which she honored for about three months in as many years. She
hated London, and its society was a mob, and its atmosphere was thickened
soda-water, and no other place had such horrible endless dinner-parties.
Still, she was going. When?—oh, to-morrow or next week.

But to-morrow became yesterday, and next week became last week, and her
black-and-white liveries were still airing themselves on the steps of
the Murat, and her black horses still were trotting to and fro the stones
of Floralia, bearing little Madame Mila hither and thither.

Their own mistress stirred out but little; it was damp weather, and she
coughed, and she shut herself up with millions of hyacinths and narcissi,
and painted a St. Ursula on wood for her chapel in Paris.

She painted well, but the St. Ursula progressed but slowly.

When she was alone she would let her palette fall to her side, and sit
thinking; and the bells would ring across the waters till she hated them.

What was the use of painting a St. Ursula? St. Ursula did not want to be
painted; and all art was nothing but repetition: nobody had found out
anything in color really, since Giotto, though to be sure he could not
paint transparencies or reflections. And she would leave her St. Ursula
impatiently, and read Cavalcaselle and Zugler and Winckelmann and Rumohr
and Passavant, and when she did go out would go to some little remote
unvisited chapel and sit for hours before some dim disputed fresco.

She would be in London next week, in its blaze of gas, jewels, luxury,
and political discussion. She said that she liked these calm, dusky,
silent places, alone with St. Louis and St. Giles and St. Jerome.

Madame Mila puzzled over her conduct in vain. She did not dare to ask
anything, because there were those sixty thousand francs, and her
cousin had helped her about them, and you cannot say very intrusive or
impertinent things to a person who is lending you money; but it was very
odd, thought Madame Mila incessantly, because she evidently was unhappy
about the man, and wanted him, and yet must have sent him away. Of course
she couldn’t have married him; but still there were ways of managing
everything; and in Hilda’s position she really could do as she liked, and
nobody ever would even have said a word.

“She must have refused him,” the Duc de St. Louis said to her more
than once, harassed by chagrin at the failure of his project, and by a
curiosity which his good breeding forbade him to seek to satisfy at the
fountain-head.

“Oh, I dare say she did,” said Madame Mila. “Of course she did. But, if
she cares for him, why should she send him away?—il y a des moyens pour
tout.”

Of course she would not have married him; that Madame Mila knew; but
Society would have made no objection to his being about her always like
her courier and her pug and the rest of her following, and if Society
doesn’t object to a thing, why on earth should you not do it?

Il ne faut pas être plus royaliste que le roi: there cannot be the
slightest necessity to be more scrupulous than the people that are round
you; indeed, to attempt to be more so is to be disagreeable and tacitly
impertinent to others.

There is a certain latitude, which, taken, makes you look much more
amiable. Madame Mila was kissed on both cheeks really with sincerity
by many ladies in many cities, merely because her nice management of
her Maurice made their Maurices easier for them, and their pleasant
consciousness of her frailty was the one touch which made them all akin.
Polyandry made easy is a great charm in Society; there is no horrid
scandal for any one, and no fuss at all. Monsieur is content and Madame
enjoys herself, everybody goes everywhere, and everything is as it should
be.

“If that old man had lived, Hilda would have been glad to be like every
one else,” Madame Mila thought, with much impatience. “Of course, because
she is quite free, she don’t care a bit to use her freedom.”

Madame Mila herself felt that although her passion for Maurice was
the fifty-sixth passion of her soul, and the most ardent of all her
existence, even Maurice himself would have lost some of his attraction
if he had lost the pleasant savor of incorrectness that attached to him,
and if she had not had to take all those precautions about his going
to another hotel, etc., etc., which enabled her to hold her place in
courts and embassies and made her friends all able to say with clear
consciences, “Nothing in it, oh, _dear_! nothing in it whatever!” Not
that she cared about any one believing that; she did not even wish
anybody to believe it; she only wanted it said,—that was all; because,
whilst it can be said a woman “goes everywhere” still, and though Heloïse
or Francesca may be willing to “lose the world for love,” the Femme
Galante has no notion of doing anything of the sort.

“They are _brouillés_, that is certain,” Madame Mila responded to the
conjectures of M. de St. Louis. “Oh, yes,—certain! He was here when Hilda
came back, and we passed him one day in the street, and he took off his
hat and bowed, and looked very cold and pale and went onwards. Now, you
know, he is gone to the Marshes, and after that, they say, he is going
into Sicily to see after that brigand Pibro. It is not like an Italian to
be so soon repulsed.”

“It is very like an Italian to be too proud to ask twice,” said the Duc,
and added, with a little smile, “He never said anything to me. Only once
lately he said that he was sure that Miladi would be a very different
creature if she had home interests and children!”

“Good gracious!” said Madame Mila, “she was quite right to have nothing
to do with him if he have that kind of ideas. How little he knows her,
too! Hilda is quite unnatural about children,—quite horrid; she never
speaks to them; and when she saw my dear little Lili dressed as Madame
l’Archiduc for the babies’ fancy ball at the Elysée, what do you think
she said? She told me that I polluted the child’s brain before it could
distinguish right from wrong, and that a mixture of Judic and Fashion
at five years old was disgusting. And Lili looked lovely!—she was so
prettily rouged, and Maurice had given her a necklace of pink pearls. But
Hilda has no human feeling at all.”

“Della Rocca did not think so,” said the Duc.

“Della Rocca was in love,” said Madame Mila, scornfully, “with the beaux
yeaux de sa cassette too, as well. They may only have quarreled, you
know. Hilda is very disagreeable and difficult. By the way, Deutschland
went after her to Rome, and proposed to her again.”

“Indeed! and she refused him again?”

“Oh, yes. She refuses them all. I did fancy she was touched by Della
Rocca, but, you see, it came to nothing; she is as cold as a crystal. She
likes to know that heaps of men are wretched about her, and she likes to
study those dingy old paintings, and that is all she does like, or ever
will like. She will be very unhappy as she grows older, and I dare say
she will be quite capable of leaving all her money away from her family
to build a cathedral or found a School of Art.”

And Madame Mila, impatient, nodded to the Duc, and dashed away in the
victoria behind the white-and-black liveries. She was managing to enjoy
her Lent after all; her mind being at rest about those sixty thousand
francs, there was no occasion to be so very rigid; low bodices she did
not wear, because she was a woman of her word; but then she had half a
hundred divine confections, cut square, or adorned with ruffs, or open en
cœur, with loveliest lace and big bouquets of roses, to make that form of
renunciation simpler; there was plenty going on, and little “sauteries,”
which nobody would call balls, and pleasant gatherings, quite harmless,
because only summoned for “music,” and altogether, what with the oasis
of Carême, and the prolongation of the Carnival in Russian houses, life
was very endurable; and there were Neapolitan oysters to fast upon
comfortably. Heaven tempers the wind to the shorn lamb; and it would be
hard if society did not soften penitence to the Femme Galante.

The Lady Hilda did keep her Lent, and kept it strictly, and was never
seen at the sauteries, and rarely at the musical parties. But then every
one knew that she was _dévote_ (when she was not slightly Voltairean),
and it could not be expected that a woman going to reign in the vast
world of London would put herself out to be amiable in Floralia. Yet,
had they only known it, she loved Floralia in her own heart, as she had
never loved any other place upon earth. The beautiful small city set
along its shining waters, with all the grace of its classic descent, its
repose of contemplative art, its sanctity of imperishable greatness, had
a hold upon her that no other spot under the sun could ever gain. If she
thought others unworthy of it, she thought herself no less unworthy. It
seemed to her that to be worthy to dwell in it, one needed to be wise and
pure and half divine, even as St. Ursula herself.

And all the pride in her was shaken to the roots: she was full of a
restless, dissatisfied humility; there were times when she hated herself
and was weary of herself to utter impatience. She shut herself up with
her art studies and the old frescoes, because they pained her less than
any other thing. She was passionately unhappy: though to other people she
only seemed a trifle more cynical and more contemptuous than before,—no
more.

The easy morality with which her cousin would have solved all difficulty
was not possible to her. She would not have cheated the old dead man from
whom her riches came, by evading him in the spirit of his will whilst
adhering to the letter. Unless she gave up her riches, her lover could
be nothing to her; and the thought of giving them up never even occurred
to her as possible. She did not know it, because she was so very tired
of so many things; but the great world she had always lived in was very
necessary to her, and had absolute dominion over her; it became tiresome,
as the trammels of empire do to a monarch; but to lay down her sceptre
would have been an abdication, and an abnegation impossible to her.
And she despised herself because they were impossible; despised herself
because to his generosity she had only responded with what at best was
but a vulgar egotism; despised herself because she had been so weak that
she had permitted his familiarities and his caresses unrebuked; despised
herself for everything with that self-scorn of a proud woman, which is
far more intense and bitter than any scorn that she has ever dealt out
upon others.

She had lived all her life on a height of unconscious, but no less
absorbing, self-admiration. She had looked down on all the aims and
objects and attainments and possessions of all other persons with a
bland and superb vanity; she had been accustomed to regard herself as
perfect, as others all united to tell her that she was; and her immunity
from mean frailties and puerile emotions had given her a belief that she
was lifted high above the passions and the follies of humankind; now,
all of a sudden, she had dropped to the lowest depths of weakness and
of selfishness; passion had touched her, yet had left her without its
courage.

In those long, lonely, studious days in Lent, studying her religious
art with wandering thoughts, she grew to hate herself; yet to resign
her empire for another’s sake never even distantly appeared to her as
possible.

One day, in a little private chapel, where there were some fine dim
workes en tempera, only to be seen by earliest morning light, she was
startled by seeing him near her. He was coming from the sacristy on
business of the church. He looked at her quickly, and would have passed
on with a silent salutation, but she approached him on an impulse which
a moment later she regretted.

“Need you avoid me?” she said, hurriedly. “Surely—I go from here so
soon—we might still be friends? People would talk less——”

He looked down on her with a cold severity which chilled her like the
passing of an icy wind.

“Madame,” he answered her, with a fleeting smile, “your Northern lovers,
perhaps, may have been content to accept such a position: I am, I
confess, thankless. I thought you too proud to heed what ‘people said’;
but, if that trouble you, I go myself to Sicily to-morrow.”

Then he bowed very low once more, and, with his salutation to the altar,
went on his way through the dusky shadows of the little chapel out into
the morning sunshine of the street.

Her eyes grew blind with tears, and she sank down before a wooden bench
upon her knees; yet could not pray there, for the bitterness and the
tumult of her heart.

She found her master in him.

His passionless, unpardoning gaze sank into her very soul, and seemed
like a ruthless light, that showed her all the wretchedness of pride and
self-love and vainest ostentations, which she had harbored there and set
up as her gods.

No amorous extolling, no feverish pursuit, of her. She comprehended that
she had wronged him, and that he would not forgive. After all,—knowing
what she knew, knowing that she could never and would never marry
him,—she had had no right to deal with him as she had done. She had
allowed him to bask in the sun of a fool’s paradise, and then had
awakened him rudely and had sent him adrift. She had been ungenerous: she
saw it, and hated her own fault with the repentance of a generous temper.

She had gone through the world with but little heed for the pain of
others; but his pain smote her conscience. After all, he had a title
to upbraid her passionately; that he refrained from doing so made her
own self-reproach the keener. There had been so many moments when with
justice he might have felt certain that she loved him; and how could he
guess the rest? She knew that she had wronged him; and she was humbled
in her own sight; she had lost her own self-respect, and her own motives
seemed to her but poor, and almost base, ones.

Nothing had ever moved her so intensely as that silent condemnation, as
that contemptuous rejection of her poor half-hearted overture of peace.

He would be all, or nothing.

When she left the chapel she loved him as she had never done before; yet
it never occurred to her to abandon her riches for his sake. The habits
and the ways of the world were too close about her; its artificial needs
and imperious demands were too much her second nature; its admiration was
too necessary to her, and her custom of deference to its conventional
laws too much an instinct; she had been too long accustomed to regard the
impulses of the heart as insane follies, and poverty of life as pain and
madness.

The same evening he did leave the town for Sicily, where he had lands
which, though beautiful, were utterly unproductive, and constantly
harried by the system of brigandage, which paralyzed the district.

“Paolo will get shot most likely. He has declared that he will not return
without having captured Pibro,” said an Italian in her hearing, at a
musical gathering, dedicated to the music of Pergolese.

Pibro was a notorious Sicilian robber. The sweet chords sounded very
harsh and jangled in her ears; she left early, and went home and took a
heavy dose of chloral, which only gave her dark and dreary dreams.

“What miserable creatures we are!” she thought, wearily. “We cannot even
sleep naturally: poor people can sleep; they lie on hard benches, and
dream with smiles on their faces.”

She got up, and looked out at the moonlight on the river, and walked to
and fro in her chamber, with the great braids of her hair flying over
her shoulders,—a lofty, slender, white figure in the pale gleam of the
lamp-rays.

A passionate, feverish, disordered pain consumed her. It terrified her.
Would it be thus weeks, months, years,—all her life?

“Perhaps it is the chloral that unnerves one,” she thought. “I will not
take it any more.”

“Only fancy, ma chère,” said Madame Mila to her next morning, with the
pretty cat-like cruelty of the Mila species, “only fancy,—that poor
dear Della Rocca is gone to his death in Sicily! So they say. There is
a horrid brigand who has been swinging some of his farmers there to
trees, and burning their cottages,—Della Rocca’s farmers, you know; and
he is gone to see about it, and to capture the wretched creature, as
if he could when all the soldiers and all the police have failed! He
will be quite certain to be shot. Isn’t it a pity? He is so handsome,
and if he would marry that little American Spiffler girl with all her
millions he might be very happy. That little Spiffler is really not
unpresentable,—rather _mignonne_, don’t you think?—and her people will
give the largest _dot_ ever heard of in Europe if they can get one of
the very old titles: and she is only seventeen: he might send her to the
Sacré Cœur for a year or two.”

“If he be gone to be shot, what use would the Spiffler _dot_ be?” said
Lady Hilda, with the coolest calm, as on a subject not even of most
remote interest; and she went on glazing a corner of the draperies of her
St. Ursula with carmine.

“The Spiffler marriage was proposed to him,” continued Madame Mila,
unheeding. “The Featherleighs undertook it, but he refused point blank.
‘_Je ne me vends pas_,’ was all he said. It was very rude, and really
that little Spiffler might be made something of; those very tiny
creatures never look vulgar, and are so easy to dress; as it is, I dare
say Furstenberg will take her; it is on the tapis, and Della Rocca won’t
come back alive, I suppose—isn’t it a hare-brained thing to do?—there
are gendarmes to look after the brigands, but it seems he has some fancy
because they were his own people that suffered—but no doubt he told you
all about it, as you and he are such friends?”

“He merely said he was going to Sicily,” said the Lady Hilda, languidly,
still glazing her St. Ursula.

Madame Mila eyed her curiously.

“You look very pale, dear; I think you paint too much, and read too
much,” she said, affectionately. “I wish you had tried to persuade him
into this Spiffler affair; it would be just the marriage for him, and a
girl of seventeen may be drilled into anything, especially when she has
small bones and little color and good teeth; if Furstenberg gets her he
will soon train her into good form,—only he will gamble away all her
money, let them tie it up as they may; and they can’t tie it up very much
if they want to make a high marriage. Good men won’t sacrifice themselves
unless they get some control of the fortune. They wouldn’t have tied it
at all with Della Rocca. Wouldn’t the little Spiffler have been better
for him than Sicily?”

“It depends upon taste,” said the Lady Hilda, changing her brushes.

“Very odd taste,” said Madame Mila. “They say Pibro always cuts the
heads off the men he takes, and sends them into Palermo—the heads, you
know—with lemons in their mouths, like boars. Isn’t it horrible? And
Della Rocca intends going up after the monster in his very fastnesses
upon the mountains! Fancy that beautiful head of his!—— Really, dear, you
do look very ill: when will you go to London?”

“Oh, some time next week.”

She went to the window and opened it; the room swam round her, the sounds
of the streets grew dull upon her ears.

“I wish you wouldn’t go till after the races,” said Madame Mila,
placidly. “I mean to stay. The place is really very nice, though one does
see the same people too often. Fancy poor Paolo ending like John the
Baptist,—the head in the charger, you know. I wonder you let him go,
for you had a great deal of influence over him; and, say what you like,
the Spiffler girl would have been better. How can you keep that window
open, with the tramontana blowing?—thanks so much for lending me the
horses——Goodness! what is the matter.”

Madame Mila paused, frightened; for the first time in all her life, Lady
Hilda, leaning against the strong north wind, had lost her consciousness
and had fainted.

“How very strange people are!” thought Madame Mila, when an hour later
her cousin had recovered herself, and had attributed her weakness to
the chloral at night and the scent of her oil paints. “If she cared for
him like that, why didn’t she keep him when she had got him?—she might
have hung him to her skirt like her châtelaine; nobody would ever have
said anything. I do begin to think that, with all her taste, and all her
cleverness, she has after all not so very much savoir-faire.”

No one had much savoir-faire to Madame Mila’s mind who did not manage
always to enjoy themselves without scruples and also without scenes.

The house in London was ordered to be kept ready night and day, but no
one went to occupy it. M. Camille Odissôt, stimulated by dread of his
patroness’s daily arrival in Paris, worked marvels of celerity upon the
ball-room walls, and drew with most exquisite precision bands of Greek
youths and maidens in the linked mazes of the dance, but none went to
admire his efforts and execution. No fashionable newspapers announced the
Lady Hilda’s arrival in either city; she stayed on and on in Floralia.

“When I know that he is safe out of Sicily I will go,” she said to
herself, and let the piles of letters and invitation-cards lie and
accumulate as they would.

She ceased to paint, and left the St. Ursula unfinished: he had sketched
it out for her on the panel, and had first tinted it en grisaille. She
had not the courage to go on with it; she changed her mode of life, and
rode or drove all the day long in the sweet fresh spring weather. When
she was not in the open air she felt suffocated. The danger which he ran
was no mere exaggeration of her cousin’s malicious inventiveness, but was
a fact, true and ghastly enough; no one heard of or from him, but his
friends said that it was the most fatal madness that had led him to risk
his life in the fastnesses of the Sicilian thieves.

“It is sheer suicide,” they said around her. “What had he to do there?—if
the law cannot enforce itself, leave it alone in its impotency. But
he had some idea that because his own villagers were among those who
suffered most, it was his place to go there and do what the law cannot
do:—he was always Quixotic, poor Paolo.”

She went out into society as Easter came, and heard all that they said,
and gave no sign of what she suffered. Worth sent her new marvels of
the spring, and she wore them, and was endlessly courted and envied and
quoted and wondered at. She was a little chillier and more cynical than
ever, and women observed with pleasure that she was looking ill and
growing too thin, which would spoil her beauty. That was all. But she had
never thought such pain possible in life as she endured now.

“If he die it is I who will have killed him,” she said in her own heart
night and day.

Once she found herself in her long lonely rides near Palestrina,
and met the old steward, and recognized him, and went into the sad,
silent, deserted house, and listened to the old man’s stories of his
beloved lord’s boyhood and manhood, and of the people’s clinging feudal
attachment to him, and of his devotion to them in the time of the cholera
pestilence.

“There is not an old charcoal-burner or a little goatherd on the estates
that would not give his life for Prince Paolo,” the steward said to her,
crying like a child because there was no news from Sicily.

The same evening she went to a great Pasqua ball at the Roubleskoff
villa. As they fastened the diamonds over her hair and in her bosom,
she felt to hate the shining, senseless, soulless stones: they were the
emblem of the things for which she had lost him; and at that very hour,
for aught they knew, he might be lying dead on some solitary shore by the
fair blue sea of Theocritus!

With a heart sick with terror and uncertainty, she went to the brilliant
crowds of the Russian house,—to the talk that was so frivolous and
tedious, to the dances she never joined in, to the homage she was so
tired of, to the monotonies and personalities and trivialities that make
up society.

M. de St. Louis hurried up to her:

“Madame, quelle chance!—our new Herakles has slain his Dragon. Maremma
has just had telegrams from Palermo. Della Rocca has positively captured
the brigand Pibro, and taken him into the city, much wounded, but alive,
and in the king’s jail by this time. A fine thing to have done, is it
not? Of course we shall all praise it, since it has succeeded; although,
in truth, a madder exploit never was attempted. Paolo was ten days in the
mountains, living on a few beans and berries: he has received no hurt
whatever; I should think they will give him the Grand Cross of Italy. It
is really a superb thing to have done. The monster has been the terror
of that district for ten years. Palermo went utterly mad with joy. It is
quite a pity there is no Ariosto to celebrate such a feat. It is very
Ariosto-like. Indeed, all the best Italians are so. Englishmen have long
ceased to be in any manner Shakspearian; but Italians remain like their
poets.”

The Duc wandered away into the subtlest and most discursive analysis
of the Ariostan school and of the national characteristics which it
displayed and was nurtured on; but she had no ear to hear it.

Outwardly she sat indifferent and calm, but her brain and her heart
were in tumult with the sweetest, loftiest, grandest pride that she had
ever known,—pride without egotism, without vanity, without a thought
of self; true pride, exultant in heroism, not the arrogant pride of
self-culture, of self-worship, of self-love, not the paltry pride of rank
and acquisition and physical perfection, not the pride of which all the
while she had been half contemptuous herself. And then—his life was safe!

Yet, had he stood before her then she must have given him the same
answer: at least, she thought so.

“What a fine thing to have done!” said Madame Mila, pausing by her in the
middle of a waltz, with her brocade train ablaze with gold. “And now he
can come back and marry the Spiffler girl. What do you say, Duc?”

“He will never marry la petite Spiffler,” said the Duc, “nor any one
else,” with a glance of meaning at Lady Hilda.

All eyes turned upon her. She played idly with her fan,—one painted long
ago by Watteau.

“M. della Rocca has succeeded, so it is heroism,” she said, calmly. “Had
he failed, I suppose it would have been foolhardiness.”

“Of course,” said the Duc. “Surely, madame, Failure cannot expect to use
the same dictionary as Success?”

“He must have the Grand Cordon, and marry the big Spiffler _dot_,” said
Madame Mila.

The Duc smiled.

“Nay, Comtesse, that were bathos indeed. Anyhow, let us rejoice that he
is living, and that the old Latin race is still productive of heroes. I
suppose we shall have details the day after to-morrow.”

“What ever could he do it for?” said Madame Mila, as she whirled away
again in the encircling arm of her Maurice: to Madame Mila such trifles
as duty, patriotism, or self-sacrifice could not possibly be any motive
power among rational creatures. “What ever could he do it for?—I suppose
to soften Hilda. But he must know very little about her: she hates
anything romantic; you heard she called it foolhardy. He _never_ will be
anything to her, not if he try for ten years. She cares about him after
her fashion, but she cares much more about herself.”

Lady Hilda did not sleep that night.

She did not even lie down; dry-eyed and with fever in her veins, she sat
by the window, watching the bright pale gold of the morning widen over
the skies, and the sea-green depths of the river catch the first sun rays
and mirror them.

She was so proud of him,—ah, heaven, so proud! The courage of her
temper answered to the courage of his action. It was Heraklean,—it was
Homeric,—that going forth single-handed to do what the law could not or
would not do, and set free from tyranny of brute force those poor tillers
of the soil who could not help themselves. The very folly and madness of
that utter disregard of peril moved her to reverence,—she who had all
her life been environed with the cool, calm, cautious, and circumspect
customs of the world.

For one moment it seemed to her possible to renounce everything for
his sake. For one moment her own passion for the mere gauds and pomps
and possessions of the world looked to her beside the simplicity and
self-sacrifice of his own life so poor and mean that she shrank from it
in disgust. For one moment she said to herself, “Love was enough.”

He had been ready to give up his life for a few poor laborers, who had no
other claim on him than that they lived upon the soil he owned; and she
who loved him had not the courage to renounce mere worldly riches for his
sake. She hated herself, and yet she could not change herself. She cared
for power, for supremacy, for indulgence, for extravagance; she thought
she heard the tittering mockery of the women she had eclipsed so long at
all her present weakness; it was all so poor, so base, so unworthy, yet
it enchained her: the world had been her religion; no one casts off a
creed long held without hard and cruel strife.

“Oh, my love, how far beneath you I am!” she thought, she whose pride had
been a by-word, and whose superb vanity had been an invulnerable armor.

She could have kneeled down and kissed his hands for very humility; yet
she could not resolve to yield.

“I might see him once more, before I go,” she thought, and so, coward
like, she put the hour of decision from her. They must part, but she
might see him once more first.

She would go away, of course, and her life in the winter city would be
with the things of the past, and she would grow used to the pain of dead
passion, and feel it less with time. Other women did, and why not she?

So she said to herself; and yet at moments a sort of despair appalled
her: what would her future be? Only one long empty void, in whose
hollowness the “pleasures” of the world would rattle like dead bones. She
began to understand that for a great love there is no death possible. It
is like Ahasuerus the Jew: it must live on in torment forever.

And how she had smiled at all these things when others had spoken of them!

The days passed slowly one by one; the beautiful city was in its spring
glory, and ran over with the blossoms of flowers, as though it were the
casket that Persephone let fall. The news-sheets were full of this deed
which he had done in Sicily; she bought them all, down to the tawdriest
little sheet that held his name, and read the well-known story again and
again a hundred and ten hundred times. His friends expected him to arrive
in the town each day, but no one heard anything direct from himself.

“It is strange he writes to none of us,” said Maremma. “Can anything have
happened?”

“Oh, no; the papers would know it,” said the Duc de St. Louis.

She overheard them, and listened with dry lips and a beating heart.

Why did he write to no one? The news-sheets had announced that he had
left Palermo for Floralia.

“He may be coming back by the marshes,” some one else suggested: “he is
reclaiming land there.”

Perhaps he stayed away, she thought, because he had heard that she still
remained in his native city.

It was mid April.

Madame Mila was organizing picnics under old Etrurian walls, and _al
fresco_ dinners in villa gardens, and she and her kind were driving out
on the tops of drags and playing baccarat upon anemone-studded lawns by
moonlight, and driving in again at or after midnight, singing Offenbach
choruses, and going to the big café in the town for supper and champagne.
Be it in winter or summer, spring or autumn, town or country, youth or
middle age, Madame Mila and her kind contrive to make no difference in
their manner of life whatever: they would sing Schneider’s songs in the
Tombs of the Prophets, they would eat lobster salad on Mount Olivet, and
they would scatter their cigar-ash over Vaucluse, Marathon, the Campo
Santo, or the grave at Ravenna with equal indifference; they are always
amused, and defy alike the seasons and the sanctities to stop them in
their amusement.

It was mid April, and with the beginning of May would come the races, and
with the races the Winter City would become the Summer City; and then the
winter fashion always fled with one bound to fresh fields and pastures
new, and left the town to silence, sunshine, roses, fruits, its own
populace with their summer songs and summer skies, and perhaps here and
there an artist or a poet, or some such foolish person, who loved it best
so in its solitude.

“Do come with us, Hilda,” said Madame Mila, one mid-April morning.

Madame Mila was attired in the simplest morning costume of cream-hued
sicilienne covered with écru lace, and she had a simple country Dorothy
hat of cream-colored velvet, lined _bleu-de-ciel_, with wreaths of
delicate nemophilæ and convolvuli and floating feathers, set on one side
of her head; Lancret might have painted her on a fan, or Fragonard on a
cabinet; she was just going to drive out with five carriages full of her
friends to a picnic at Guido Salvareo’s villa; they were to dine there,
play lansquenet there, and come back in the small hours; they had all
postillons, _de Lonjumeau_, powdered, and with ribboned straw hats; the
horses were belled, and the bells were jingling in the street; Madame
Mila was in the most radiant spirits; she had won five hundred napoleons
the night before, and had them all to adventure over again to-night.

“Do come with us, Hilda,” she urged. “You do nothing but go those stupid
long drives by yourself; it is very bad for you; and it will be charming
to-day; Salvareo has such taste; it is really quite romantic to sit upon
those anemones, and have the goats come and stare at you; and he always
does things so well, and his cook is so good. Do come with us; I am sure
it would do you good.”

Lady Hilda looked up from the St. Ursula, which she was finishing:

“My dear Mila, you know perfectly well how I detest that kind of thing.
Teresa’s songs, drag-seats, and eager efforts to imitate the worst kind
of women!—go to it, if it amuse you; but, with all gratitude, allow me to
decline.”

“How disagreeable you are!” said Madame Mila, pettishly. “One must do
something with oneself all these long days. If it were Palestrina, I
suppose you would go.”

Lady Hilda deigned to give no reply. She touched in the gold background
of her saint. Madame Mila looked at her with irritation: no one likes to
be despised, and she knew that her cousin did very nearly despise her,
and all the ways and means of enjoyment in which her heart delighted.

Lady Hilda, tranquilly painting there, annoyed her inexpressibly.
Why should any woman be above the box-seats of drags, and all their
concomitant attractions?

She took her revenge.

“Do as you like, of course; but you always _do_ do that,” she said,
carelessly. “There are two seats vacant. St. Louis and Carlo Maremma were
to have gone with us, but they went to Della Rocca instead. Oh, didn’t
you know it?—he reached Palestrina two days ago, very ill with marsh
fever. It is fever and cholera and ague and all sorts of dreadful things
together. Isn’t it odd?—to have escaped all that danger in Sicily, and
then get this in the swamps coming back? Nobody knew it till late last
night, when his steward got frightened and sent in for the physicians. He
is very bad, I believe,—not likely to live. You know they go down under
that—sometimes—in twenty-four hours.”

Lady Hilda seemed to reach her at a single step, though the distance of
the room was between them.

“Is that true?—or is it some jest?”

Madame Mila, appalled, looked up into her face.

“It is true,—quite true. Oh, Hilda, take your hand off! you hurt me. How
could I tell you would care about it like that?”

“Is it true?” muttered her cousin, again.

“Indeed, indeed it is,” she whimpered, trembling. “Oh, let me go; you
spoil my lace. If you cared for the man like that, why didn’t you keep
him when you had got him? I know you could not have married him; but
nobody would have said anything.”

Lady Hilda put her out into the corridor, and closed the door and locked
it within.

Madame Mila, frightened, astonished, and outraged, went down to her
Maurice, and the drag, and the ribboned and powdered postillons, and the
horses with their jingling bells and plaited tails; the gay cavalcade
rattled off along the river-street towards the city gates as the clocks
tolled three.

Lady Hilda and St. Ursula were left alone.

Within less than half an hour the black horses were harnessed and bore
their mistress towards Palestrina. Never before moved by impulse, impulse
alone governed her now,—the impulse of despair and remorse. She cared
nothing who saw her or who knew; for once she had forgotten herself.

The long drive seemed eternity; she thought the steep winding mountain
roads would never end; when Palestrina came in sight, pale and stately
against its dark background of forest trees, she felt as if her heart
would break. He had gone through all those perils afar off, only to be
dying there!

It was five o’clock by the convent chimes when they reached the crest of
the hill on which the old place stood. The lovely hill-side was covered
with the blue and white of the wild hyacinths and gold of the wild
daffodils. The lofty stone pines spread their dark-green roofs above
her head. Flocks of birds were singing, in the myrtle thickets, their
sweet shrill evensong. The shining valley lay below like a cloud of
amber light. The surpassing loveliness, the intense stillness of it all
made the anguish within her unbearable. What she had missed all her life
long!——

There was a chapel not far from the house, set in the midst of the pines,
with the cross on its summit touching the branches, and its door-way
still hung round with the evergreens and flowers of its passed Easter
feasts. There were men and women and children standing about on the turf
in front of it; they were most of them crying bitterly.

She stopped her horses there, and called a woman to her, but her lips
would not frame any question. The woman guessed it.

“Yes, my beautiful lady,” she said, with many tears. “We have been
praying for Prince Paolo. He is very ill, up yonder. The marsh-sickness
has got him. May the dear Mother of God save him to us! But he is dying,
they say——”

“We would die in his stead, if the good angels would let us,” said one of
the men, drawing near: the others sobbed aloud.

She put out her hand to the man,—the slender proud hand that she had
refused to princes. Wondering, he fell on his knee and would have kissed
her hand. She drew back in horror.

“Do not kneel to me! I have killed him!” she muttered; and she urged her
panting horses forward to the house.

She bade them tell the Duc de St. Louis to come to her upon the
terrace. She leaned there tearless, white as death, still as marble,
the beautiful, tranquil springtime all around, and the valley shining
like gold in the light of the descending sun. It seemed to her that ages
passed before the soft step of her old friend sounded near her: he was
surprised and startled, but he did not show it.

“There is still hope,” he hastened to say, ere she could speak. “Within
the last hour he is slightly better: they give him quinine constantly. If
the chills and shivering do not return, it is just possible that he may
live. But——”

His voice faltered in its serenity, and he turned his head away.

“It is not likely?”

Her own voice had scarcely any sound of its natural tone left in it, yet
long habit was so strong with her that she spoke calmly.

“It is not likely. This deadly marsh-poison is short and fierce. After
the fatigue and fasting in Sicily it has taken fearful hold on him. But
in an hour or two they will know,—one way or the other.”

“I will stay here. Come and tell me,—often. And if—if the worst come,—let
me see him. Leave me now.”

He looked at her, hesitated, then left her as she asked. He guessed all
that passed in her thoughts, all that had gone before; and he knew that
she was not a woman who would bear pity, and that she was best left thus
in solitude.

Like a caged animal she paced to and fro the long length of the stone
terrace.

She was all alone.

The golden radiance of the declining day shone everywhere around, the
birds sang, the dreamy bells rang in the Ave Maria from hill to hill, all
was so still, so peaceful, so beautiful; yet, with the setting of the
sun, his life might go out in darkness.

In her great misery, her soul was purified. The fire that consumed her
burned away the dross of the world, the alloy of selfishness and habit
and vain passions. “Oh, heaven! give me his life, and I will give him
mine!” she cried in her heart, all through those terrible hours, and yet
recoiled in terror from the uselessness and daring of her prayer. What
had she ever done, that she could merit its fulfillment?

He might have been hers, all hers; and she had loved the base things of
a worldly greatness better than himself. And now he lay dying there, as
the sun dropped westward and night came.

She felt no chill of evening. She felt neither hunger nor thirst. Crowds
of weeping people hung about in the gardens below. She heard nothing that
passed round her, save the few words of her old friend when from time to
time he came and told her that there was no change.

The moon rose, and its light fell on the stone of the terrace, and
through the vast deserted chambers opening from it,—on the gray worn
marbles of the statues, and on the pale angels of the frescoes.

It was nine o’clock: the chimes of the convent above on the mountains
told every hour. Unceasingly she paced to and fro, to and fro, like some
mad or wounded creature. The silence and serenity of the night, the
balmy fragrance of it, and the silvery light, were so much mockery of
her wretchedness. She had never thought that there could be agony like
this——and yet from God no sign.

Nearly another hour had passed before her friend approached her again.
She caught the sound of his step in the darkness; her heart stood still;
her blood was changed to ice, frozen with the deadliness of the most
deadly fear on earth; she could only look at him with wide-opened,
strained, blind eyes.

For the first time, he smiled.

“Take comfort,” he said, softly. “He has fallen asleep; he is less
exhausted; they say that he may live. How cold you are!—this night will
kill you.”

She fell upon her knees on the stone pavement, and all her bowed frame
was shaken by convulsive weeping.

He drew aside in reverence, and left her alone in the light of the moon.

When midnight came, hope was certain.

The sleep still lasted; the fever had abated, the cold chills had not
returned.

She called her old friend to her out into the terrace.

“I will go now. Send to me at daybreak; and keep my secret.”

“May I tell him nothing?”

“Tell him to come to me,—when he is able.”

“Nothing more?”

“No; nothing. He will know——”

“But——”

She turned her face to him in the full moonlight, with the tears of her
joy coursing down her cheeks, and he started at the change in her that
this one night of suffering had wrought.

“No, say nothing more. But—but—you shall see what my atonement shall be,
and my thankfulness.”

Then she went away from him softly in the darkness and the fragrance of
the April night. The Duc looked after the lights of her carriage with a
mist over his own eyes, but he shrugged his shoulders with a sigh.

“Who can ever say that he knows a woman? Who can ever predict what she
will not say or will not do or will not be?” he murmured, as he turned
and went within to watch beside the bed of his friend, as the stars grew
clearer and the dawn approached.




CHAPTER XIII.


A month later Paolo della Rocca led his wife through what had once been
his mother’s chambers at Palestrina, and which were now prepared for
her with all their wide windows unclosed and looking out to the golden
afternoon glories of the bright southwest.

In the little oratory which opened out of the bed-chamber, there was hung
an altar-picture; it was the picture of San Cipriano il Mago.

“Take it as my marriage gift,” he murmured to her. “You threw away your
magic wand and renounced the world for me,—oh, my love, my love; God
grant you the saint’s reward!”

She laid her hands upon his heart and leaned her cheek upon them.

“My reward is here.”

“And you will never repent?”

“Did Cyprian repent when he broke his earthly bonds and gained eternal
life? Once I was blind; but now I see. The world is nothing; Love is
enough.”




CHAPTER XIV.


“C’est étonnant!” murmured the Duc de St. Louis softly to himself, the
same evening, standing on the steps of the Hôtel Murat, after assisting
in the morning at those various civil ceremonies and impediments with
which our beloved Italy, in her new character as a nation of Free
Thought, does her best to impede and deter all such as cling to so
old-world and pedantic a prejudice as marriage.

The dénouement of the drama which he himself had first set in action had
fallen upon him like a thunderbolt. He had had no conception of what
would happen. He had thought to enrich his friend by one of the finest
fortunes in Europe, and lo!—the Duc remained in an amazement and a sense
of humiliation from which he could not recover.

“C’est étonnant!” he murmured, again and again. “Who would ever have
believed that Miladi was a woman to beggar herself and play the romance
of the ‘world lost for love’? If I had only imagined!—if I had only
dreamed! I will never propose a marriage to any living being again;
never.”

“You have nothing to be so remorseful about, Duc,” said Lord Clairvaux,
with a sigh, himself utterly exhausted by all the law work that he had
been obliged to go through. “It is very funny, certainly,—she of all
women in the world! But they are happy enough, and he really is the only
living creature that ever could manage her. If anybody had ever told me
that any man would change Hilda like that!”

“Happy!” echoed M. de St. Louis, with his fin sourire. He was a man who
had no delusions; there were no marriages that were happy; some were
calm, that was the uttermost, and to remain calm required an immense
income; money alone was harmony.

Lord Clairvaux lighted a very big cigar, and grumbled that it had been
horrible to have to leave England in the Epsom month, but that he thanked
goodness that it was the last of her caprices that he would be worried
with; and he hoped that this Italian would like them when he had had a
year or two of them.

“I don’t know, though, but what it is the only sensible caprice she ever
had in her life; eh?” he added; “except buying Escargot and giving him
to me after the races,—you remember? Hang it, I’ve never seen such a
Chantilly before or since as that was!”

“We never do see such a race as the one that we happen to win,” murmured
M. de St. Louis.

“Of course it’s an awful cropper to take, and all that; but I’m not sure
but what she’s done a wise thing, though all the women are howling at
her like mad,” continued Lord Clairvaux; “a woman can’t live forever on
chiffons, you see.”

“Most women can—admirably. They buy at eighty as much white hair, the
coiffeurs tell me, as they buy blonde or black at twenty.”

“Ah, but they can’t, if they have a bit of heart or mind in them. Hilda
has both.”

“The case is so rare I could not prescribe for it: let us hope Miladi’s
own prescription will suit her,” said the Duc, whose serene good humor
was still slightly ruffled.

“Well, she always was all extremes and contraries,” said Lord Clairvaux.
“You never could say one minute what she wouldn’t do the next. By George!
you know there is nothing too odd for her to go in for; I should not
wonder an atom if when we come here two or three years hence, we find
her worshiping a curly Paolino, seeing to the silkworms, and studying
wine-making: she’s really tried everything else, you know.”

“Everything except happiness? Well, very few of us get any chance of
trying that, or would appreciate it if we did get it. Happiness,”
pursued the Duc, pensively, “must, after all, be almost as monotonous as
discontent,—when one is used to it. It is comforting to think so; for
there is very little of it. I cannot realize Miladi among the babies and
the wine-presses; but you may be right.”

“Well, you know she’s tried everything else,” repeated Lord Clairvaux.
“It will be like Julius Cæsar and his cabbage-garden.”

“You mean Diocletian,” said the Duc. “Do you leave to-night? We may as
well go as far as Paris together.”

And he turned back into the hotel to bid farewell to Madame Mila.

Madame Mila, who had made the religious and civil ceremonies gorgeous
in the last new anomalous anachronisms, with a classic clinging dress,
quite Greek in its cut, covered all over with the eyes out of peacocks’
feathers, and a cotte-de-maille bodice, stiff as pasteboard with gold and
silver embroideries, and who was now on the point of departure across
the Mont Cenis, covered up in the most wonderful of hooded cloaks trimmed
with the feathers of the Russian diver and the grebe; about one hundred
and fifty birds, happy, peaceful, and innocent under their native skies,
had died to trim the wrap, and it would probably be worn about half a
dozen times; for feathers are so very soon chiffonnés, as everybody knows.

“They are quite mad, both of them!” said the Countess, giving her small
fingers in adieu, and turning to see that Maurice had all the things she
wanted and was duly hooking them on to her ceinture of oxidized silver.

“Perhaps, madame,” said the Duc, who indeed thought so himself. “But if
a few people were not mad occasionally there would be no chance for the
sanity of the world.”

“Well, they will repent horribly, that is one comfort; she most of all,”
said Madame Mila, with asperity. “She ought to have been prevented;
treated for lunacy, you know; in France they would have managed it at
once with a _conseil de famille_. Maurice, you are screwing the top of
that flacon on all wrong: do take more care! She will repent horribly,
but she don’t see it now. Of course if she had had to lose the jewels
they would have brought her to reason. As it is, she don’t in the least
realize the horrible thing that she has done,—not in the least, not in
the least. When I said to her that she wouldn’t be able even to afford
Worth, she laughed, and answered that she would have one dress from
him every year for old friendship’s sake for the contadini’s vintage
balls, and that he would be sure to embroider her the loveliest Bacchic
symbolisms and put the cone of the thyrsus for buttons!—only fancy! She
could actually jest about _that_! How miserable she will be in three
months when she has come back to her senses; and how miserable she will
make _him_!”

“Chère Comtesse,” said the Duc, taking up his hat and cane, “everybody
repents everything. It is a law of Fate. The only difference is that some
people repent pleasantly and some unpleasantly. Let us hope that our
beautiful Duchess will repent pleasantly. Madame, j’ai l’honneur de vous
saluer—Bon voyage; au revoir.”


THE END.




FOOTNOTES


[1]

    “Leavest thou me?—leave thee I will not.
    Dost thou forsake me, yet will I follow thee.
    Does the sea take thee?—the sea will I traverse.
    Wilt thou wander the world, then a wanderer am I.”

[2] The old conservative party is so termed in Italy,—_codini_.




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