Vestigia. Vol. I.

Being gifted with a perfect, an unalterable good humour, De Rossi accepted his wife's altered opinion of him as he accepted the reduced circumstances of his material life: both were more or less of his own making, and between them they troubled him but very little. His experience of life was a succession of easy contentments. He enjoyed his own emotions. He liked sinning as he liked repenting, and in both phases he was alike sincere – and unreliable. He was capable of the deepest enthusiasms – the tenderest emotions – but he was unable to master his own shifting moods for a week. His facile nature lapsed away from the highest points it reached with the inevitableness of water which seeks its level. He was attractive; he was weak; he was untrustworthy; – and yet he was always attractive. 'The sort of man,' Valdez said of him, 'the sort of man who orders his dog "to come here," and when the beast lies down in a corner, – "Ah, the clever dog! he knew I was going to tell him to do that next!" says my amiable gentleman.'

Before her marriage – she was five years older than her husband – Catarina had been the confidential maid of the Marchesa Balbi. She had never wholly lost her place at the Villa. When the young heir was born, a month or two after the birth of Dino, she was, at her own earnest entreaty, made the balia of the little Marchese. Whenever the family came to Leghorn she was always going up to the Villa; the Marchesa was perpetually sending for her. There was no great mental barrier between the Italian lady and her old servant: both were convent bred, with much the same sort of education – and what hopes and fears had they not shared since then in common! Catarina would stand for hours at the foot of her old mistress' sofa, talking to her in undertones of things which every one else had forgotten. The two women were bound to one another by a whole world of recollected emotions – the night young Gasparo was ill; his first steps; the day he had first moved alone from the arms of his nurse to the arms of his mother, – to each of them these had been events in life.

As the years went by Olinto objected less and less to his wife's frequent absences. 'She is a good woman, my Dino, but hard – hard,' he would say sometimes to his boy – and by the very passion with which the child loved him he could see how much he had inherited of his mother's loyal and serious nature. He began to fear vaguely lest, his boy growing older, he should begin to learn to judge him – and he had grown strangely dependent on that one unhesitating faith.

Things were then in this condition, when one day, Dino being at the time some twelve years old, he was taken by his father to a political banquet, a sort of subscription supper given by one of the clubs to which Olinto had at some time belonged.

Dino never forgot that supper. There had been some objection made to his own presence when he was first taken in; high words exchanged between some of the men present and his father; sneering references, which the child only half understood, to other debts, and former feasts unpaid for. In the midst of the confusion Dino saw his father rise suddenly from his place at the table; he looked about him, waving his hand to command silence: his face was very white.

There was a general outcry of 'Sit down! sit down!' – 'It's too early yet!' – 'We don't want any more speeches;' and then Dino saw the man who was sitting on his other side lean well forward and put his hand upon his father's shoulder. 'Don't try and talk to them now. Wait till after supper. And – sit down, De Rossi, do. There's a good fellow,' he said. And then, as Olinto yielded mechanically to the pressure, his neighbour drew back, looking kindly enough into Dino's terrified face.

'Don't be frightened, my little fellow. They often make a noise at these suppers. It means – nothing,' he said, with a half contemptuous smile.

Dino looked at him for a moment in silence. Then the boy's face flushed scarlet, and his eyes filled with tears.

'It can't mean anything,' he said desperately. 'My – my father would never have brought me here if he did not mean to pay for it.' But he did not look at his father, who was arguing eagerly across the table with his opposite neighbour, and there was a lump in his throat which seemed to choke him as he spoke.

'What, are you Olinto's little chap? Is De Rossi your father? And what's your name, then? What do you call yourself, my little lad?' the stranger asked good-naturedly.

'My name is Bernardo. But they call me Dino at home,' the boy said, rather huskily.

'Well, then, Dino, my boy, eat your supper, and don't trouble your head about what doesn't concern you. Your share of it shall be paid for, never fear. Now then, what's the matter now? Don't sit and stare at your father. He won't notice you. He's – busy. If you are wise you'll tell me what you want,' he repeated, with the same equivocal smile.

There was something in his kind and melancholy face which had won the boy's entire confidence. 'I am afraid, sir – I don't think my father has got enough money with him,' he said hastily, with burning cheeks and downcast eyes. When he ventured to look up he met his neighbour's glance fixed full upon him with a certain friendly amusement.

'So you are Olinto de Rossi's son,' he said slowly; and Dino wondered to hear him say it, for surely he knew that already. 'Well, well. Per Bacco! if the evolutionists are to be trusted, why, here's a curious experiment of Dame Nature's. Well, look here, my boy, did you ever see me before?'

'No, sir.'

'Did you ever hear your father speak of Pietro Valdez?'

'No, sir.'

'H – m. Well! that's my name. And I spend my time teaching people how to play the guitar, and tuning pianos: that's my trade. So now you know who I am. And I've known your father a good many years now, first and last, a good many years. Just tell him to turn around for a moment. I say, De Rossi – You look out for yourself; I don't want to crush you, my boy.'

He leaned well forward, and spoke in a low voice to Olinto. Dino was crouching back in his chair: he could not hear what passed between the two men; but half an hour later, and having in the meantime, and at the instigation of his new friend, partaken heartily of his supper, he had the satisfaction of seeing his father carelessly fling a gold piece into the subscription plate, where it lay and glittered obtrusively among the pile of meaner silver coins.

The boy's eyes sparkled with triumph at the sight. He looked up with a frank laugh into the face of his new companion. 'Did you see that, sir?' he asked eagerly, his face all aglow.

'Ay,' Valdez answered almost indifferently. He leaned back on his chair and contemplated the row of faces before him. 'Presently they will begin their fine speechifying. Look here, my boy, I see signs – never mind what they are – but I see symptoms of a coming row. It will be nothing to speak of, I daresay, but all the same I want you to promise me this: If I send you home, I want you to cut away at once without stopping to ask questions, do you see? Now promise me you'll do that, like a good little chap.'

'I'll stay with my father, sir. I must stay with my father. And if you please, sir, I'd rather stay, really. I'm not afraid.'

'Now, who ever supposed you were afraid, my little man? But that is not the question. Now, look here – ah! – '

He stopped short. A sudden silence had fallen upon the room. A man near him roared out 'Hush!' and smote the table before him with his clenched fist. For the last time in his life Olinto de Rossi had risen to make a speech.

He had been very quiet all the previous part of the evening; sitting most of the time with his head leaning upon his hand, hardly speaking to any one, not even to his boy. As he rose slowly to his feet a wild burst of ironical applause greeted him from every part of the room, only Valdez sat silent and motionless, staring down at his plate with a moody troubled face. De Rossi stood leaning a little forward; his thin cheeks, which had grown so deadly pale of late, were burning now with vivid spots of red. 'Friends,' he began, 'Gentlemen – ' He hesitated for an instant, then burst into wild invective against Church and King and State. 'The State – the State, I tell you, is the very negation of liberty,' he cried, 'and no matter who command, they make all serve. You talk, some of you, of changing the political régime. How will you change it? For what good? If a man among you has a thorn in his foot, will it help him if he change his boots? I tell you, it is the thorn, the thorn itself, that you must get out, wrench out, cut out, if need be. We, the people, how often have we asked our rulers for bread and they have given us a stone? Yet this is scarcely prudent, friends, for a stone is a fair missile. What! will they live on in their princely palaces and offer to us, to the people, the bare right and privilege of labour? Labour! I tell you that God Himself has set His curse upon labour. I – tell – you – '

His voice had failed him suddenly. He put his hand up to his head, staring wildly about him.

'Go on, go on. That's the right sort of stuff. Down with everything. A general mess and scrimmage, and myself dancing on the top of it; that's your real radical programme. That's what you call reform!' a man in the crowd at the foot of the table cried out derisively. There was a general laugh; some indication of a wish to hustle him into silence; some shouts of 'Viva De Rossi!' The men had all been drinking freely, and were ripe for any mischief.

'I say, De Rossi, get up on your chair, man. We can't hear you,' some one called out again; the suggestion was received with another hoarse roar of approval. Two or three men moved towards the orator as if with the intention of forcing him to adopt this new position.

'For God's sake, can't you let the man alone? Don't you see that he is ill?' cried Valdez, suddenly starting forward.

Some one, more humane than his fellows, had poured De Rossi out a glass of wine. He lifted it to his lips now, facing them all, with flushed face and wild glittering eyes, 'I drink to your health, gentlemen!'

He stood so for a second amidst frantic shouts of applause, with one hand outstretched. To Dino's eyes he looked like some demi-god mastering a whirlwind. And then all of a sudden the brimming glass slipped from his nerveless hand, and was dashed into a thousand pieces. He watched it fall with a half-bewildered laugh; he staggered, and clutched at the table; a sudden red mark discoloured his smiling mouth, and he fell heavily forward, face downwards, without a word or a groan.

He had broken a blood-vessel; he was still insensible as they carried him back to his home through the dark and empty streets; and Dino walked beside the litter and held his father's hand. His wife met them at the door with Palmira, who was then a baby, in her arms. Her face seemed turned to stone as she listened to Valdez's explanations. Only, as they laid her husband gently down upon his bed, and uncovered his face, a quick spasm contracted her rigid mouth, and she stooped and kissed the dying man upon his forehead.

'I knew it would come. It had to come,' she said drearily. And after that she scarcely spoke again, turning away from all consolation, and seeming to find relief only in the few practical cares which were left to her.

And so, like some impatient wave breaking too far from shore, whose troubled existence reaches its climax in but one instant of wasted force, in the midst of a sea where every wave which lifts itself must fall, so Olinto died, and his idle raving was hushed, and his place knew him no more. Of mourners he had few or none; it was only to his boy that he left so much as a memory. That was almost the lad's entire heritage, that and the friendship of Pietro Valdez.

As little Dino grew up every other detail of his life seemed to change about him, as things do change in the lives of people too poor to order their surrounding circumstances. The Marchesa came less and less often to the Villa Balbi; he had lost the familiar companionship of his foster-brother; of his first childish recollections there was only old Drea left, and the dear face of Italia, to illuminate the past. But, whatever else was altered, he had never lost sight of Valdez. Indeed, since that night the man seemed to have taken a strange fancy to the boy; as the years went on those two were always more and more together; an arbitrary friendship, in which one was ever the leader and teacher and guide.

Even to Dino there was always a certain mystery about Valdez, but it was the mystery of pure blankness; there were no secrets about him, chiefly because he seemed to own no history. He never willingly spoke of himself, or alluded to former acquaintances or habits. If he had any one belonging to him, if he had ever been married, no one precisely knew. He never spoke to women, or appeared interested in them. He lived alone, where he had lived for twenty years, in two small rooms in one of the narrowest streets of Leghorn. His wants were few and unchanging, and the money which he earned amply sufficed for them. In his working hours he followed his trade, as he called it, with the sober exactitude and indifference of a machine. He was a Spaniard by birth, and a Protestant by conviction; and he believed in a coming universal republic as he believed in the rising of the sun. After a dozen years of companionship that was the most that Dino knew of him.

*****

As he paced up and down there by the sea, a hundred confused images and impressions came floating back out of that past to Dino. His father's face, and the unforgotten sound of his voice, – Sor Checco, Gasparo, Drea, dear old Valdez, and those men at the café to-night, and the scene this morning at the office, and the scene at the banquet, that other night, long ago, – how long ago it seemed! It was as if some storm-wave breaking over his life and soul had stirred the very depths of old remembrance, until he could scarcely distinguish the actual from the past, the living from the dead. They were all mixed up with the darkness and the wind and the sense of the restless seething water about him.

When he thought of Italia he stopped short. He could not, he would not think of Italia – not then. He could bear nothing further to-night, he told himself, with a curious sense of relief and quiet. The measure was full; he could realise nothing more. And, indeed, beyond great pain as beyond great joy, there is this mysterious region of rest. Great passions end in calm, as the two poles are surrounded by similar spaces of silent, ice-locked sea.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MORNING AFTER

A woman's anxiety is always awake, always asking. She entreats to know in direct proportion to her dread of the coming knowledge. How could it well be otherwise, while her life is one frail tissue of delicate probabilities, in the midst of which she waits, like a spider in its net, for the possible gifts of fate? And the web may glisten as it will in the sunlight; it makes but a poor shield against a blow.

As Catarina busied herself about her ordinary household work that next morning there were faint new lines of care about her close shut mouth, and the orbits of her eyes were darkened as if with sleeplessness and long watching. But, whatever had troubled her, she made no direct mention of it to Dino, – setting his belated breakfast before him carefully but in silence. It was not until he pushed aside his plate and stood up, reaching mechanically for his hat, ready to go out, that she admitted to herself that if she wanted an explanation she must ask for it; or seemed to notice his movements, and even then it was only to say indifferently,

'Shall you be home to dinner? Or do you mean to stay at Drea's? is that a part of your new arrangements?'

'Nay, but, mother, I am sorry to have given you so much more trouble. The fact is I – I over-slept myself this morning. When I came in last night I was more tired than I knew,' said Dino cheerfully.

'Ay, when you came in! When you did come! It was after ten o'clock when you brought home that blessed child, so worn out with the wind and what not that she fell asleep on my knee, bless her little heart! before I had fairly time to get her clothes off. And after that I sat up for three hours in that chair, Dino. It was striking one by the Duomo clock before I went to bed.'

She turned to the dresser by the wall and began reaching down plate after plate, and looking at each one as she wiped it. 'I had this china before you were born; the signora Marchesa took me with her to choose it – and it was my wedding present from the Villa – sent down by one of the footmen the day after I was married. I was sitting by that window when it was brought in – a great heavy basket that the man could hardly lift upon the table – only your father helped him. And there was never a piece of it broken until you knocked down the saucer the day I asked you to help me with the cups. But it's ungrateful work taking care o' things that just end by being used by others who don't see any difference. There's a plenty o' people in the world have got brighter eyes for looking at their sweethearts with than for looking after their husband's house. Palmira tells me that my boy, my young master, is at home again, Dino?'

'Ay, signor Gasparo's here.'

'And went to see Sor Drea on his very first evening! He used to come to me. Guarda questa! But young men will be young men. And 'tis true that Andrea has sense enough to look after that girl of his. She's given you enough encouragement – '

'Mother!' said Dino in his severest voice; a voice which secretly awed her.

He faced around suddenly, and stood looking at her as she moved to and fro.

'Mother! it is not generous, it is not kind, to speak of Italia in that fashion. And you know it hurts me. I love her,' he said, his voice changing. 'Of course I love her. I don't care who knows that I love her. But encouragement! I don't know what you mean. Encouragement from Italia! She has never thought of such a thing; she would not know what you meant – '

'Eh, don't tell me, lad. I've been a girl myself. 'Tis a poor dog that doesn't know when he's wagging his own tail,' cried Catarina bitterly, stooping to wipe the dust off the leg of a chair with the corner of her apron. She made a busy pretence of it for a moment or two, and then her hands dropped helplessly; she stood up and looked at her tall son. 'An' so you love her; – you love that little girl! You never told me of it before, lad.'

'But, mother dear, you never asked me. I always thought you knew it. It was plain enough. And how was I to guess you wanted to be told? I have never even told – her,' the young man said.

'And she was to come first? Nay, 'tis but natural. The young birds build new nests. Ah, but, Dino! Dino! I've lost you. I've lost my own boy – '

Her voice broke: she turned abruptly away, and hid her gray head upon her clasped hands.

'But, mother dear, – dearest mother!'

He stood with one hand on her shoulder, looking down at her bowed head with a curiously-blended feeling of distress over her grief and impatience at its unreasonableness: 'Mother! After all, you must have expected it sooner or later: it is but natural – '

'Yes, lad. I know. 'Tis as you say: 'tis natural,' Catarina said meekly; and then she turned her face away again with a sob and a feeling of utter inevitable loneliness. How could the lad understand? He was young, and she was growing old; and to him what was natural was easy, and to her it was hard. That was all the difference.

She swallowed something in her throat, a lump which seemed to choke her, and stood up. 'Poverino! I won't tease you any more: don't be vexed with me, lad,' she said soothingly, looking into his perplexed face with a quivering smile. She put up her hand to brush off an imaginary speck of dust from his coat. 'Nay, 'tis no wonder if people love you. Go, my Dino, go to – her,' she said; and as Dino bent his head and kissed her, 'It's because I am sending him away,' she thought, bitterly enough.

'And how about Monte Nero, mother? The pilgrimage, you know. Italia was asking about it last night,' he said cheerfully, glad to see her beginning to accept things more placidly.

'Ay, lad, I'll think of it; but go now, go. I will not – I cannot – I mean, do as you please. Make all your plans, and I will help you carry them out. It's what I'm good for now, I suppose. I must learn not to stand in your way – and hers.'

'Mother!'

'I – Don't mind me, my Dino. Don't be angry with your old mother, my own boy. It was only a – a surprise. I shall be all right when you come back; for you will come back to dinner, my Dino? I am good for that much: I can take care of you still.'

She followed him to the door, and then went and stood by the open window, shading her eyes from the bright March sun, to watch him as he passed down the street. Perhaps he would turn his head and look up. But no. From that height she could not distinguish his face; she felt a pang of idle regret at the thought; he seemed to get so soon beyond her reach. After a while she went into her son's room, and opened all his drawers, and began to turn over his possessions. She folded an old coat which she found on the back of a chair: she folded it carefully. I am not sure that she did not kiss it. Everything belonging to him with which she had anything to do was kept in the most scrupulous order, and she wanted to find something to mend, some work which she could do for him.

There was a small faded photograph, a portrait of his father, hanging over the young man's bed. She went and looked at it as it hung against the wall, then took it down and stood with it in her hand. It was the likeness of a man who had been in every way a disappointment in her life; but she was not thinking of that now. The faded face looked at her out of the past with its easy confident smile. She only remembered the first year or two after her marriage, and her young husband's kindness to her, and his first pride and pleasure in their boy. 'If he had not gone there would have been some one left to understand,' she thought. Her own personal life seemed ended: she gazed with the strangest pang of regret and companionship at this fading likeness of the dead face she had loved in her youth. What if afterwards he had neglected her? At least he had come to her once of his own accord, for her own sake – and they had been young together.

She felt herself quite alone, this austere and self-contained woman – alone in a world which could never change for the better now; in which each new morning would only bring new deprivations in place of fresh joys.

*****

Dino had dressed himself in workman's clothes that morning. Drea did not expect him yet, but it was just possible there might be something which wanted doing in the boat. It was such a bright fresh morning after the storm; a morning to make young hearts beat lightly and young blood run fast with a quick sense and joy of dear life. But as he turned mechanically down the busy Via Grande he saw nothing of all this. His mother's words, the way in which she had taken it for granted that if he loved Italia, Italia must love him, and how there could be but one possible solution to their lives, all that would have been so natural, so full of hope and radiant happiness last month, last week – last week? only yesterday, only one day ago! And now; oh, the bitter irony of fate! it was he himself who had forged the chain which bound him. He cursed his own folly. Why could he not have been contented? was he not deeply enough involved before then? why could he not have let that last crowning piece of madness alone?

The look of the commonplace crowd around him, the presence of those scores of hurrying, interested, contented, busy men, the very look of the shop windows, all things seemed to conspire together to discredit and ridicule the devoted side, the dramatic side, the only possible side, of his situation. In a world like this – a world of common-sense and convenience and keen enjoyments, a world of sunlight and youth and possibilities, to choose deliberately, at four-and-twenty, to throw away all one's future, all one's love, all one's life in doing —that. Damn it! Even to himself he would never mention that accursed plan, he would never think of it.

He thrust his hands deeper into the great pockets of his rough jacket, and threw up his head defiantly, as he glanced about him. And each house he passed, each soldier, each policeman, each lamp-post even – every visible sign of peace and law and order – seemed a tangible ironical comment on his folly. And why, in God's name, had he done this thing? He remembered so well that evening – it was after their demonstration had been dispersed by the police, and he was hot with a sense of battle, and wild with excitement, with bitter baffled indignation. It had seemed so easy a thing then to pledge away his future. He had done it without consulting Valdez – suddenly, madly, on the desperate impulse of the moment. He had done it in a moment of mental crisis; because he was imaginative, because he believed in the cause, heart and soul, because he had been a fool. And as he said that to himself some old words of Pietro Valdez came back to him with sudden force out of some old forgotten talk of theirs. 'How can any one believe in your highest emotions?' he heard the familiar voice asking him, 'how can you expect any one to believe in your highest emotions if you question them yourself?'