Vittoria. Complete
- -
- 100%
- +
Beppo tried hard to get her to carry the fan; but she lifted her fingers in a perfect Susannah horror of it, though still bidding him to follow. Naturally she did not go fast through the dark passages, where the game of the fan was once more played out, and with accompaniments. The accompaniments she objected to no further than a fish is agitated in escaping from the hook; but ‘Nein, nein!’ in her own language, and ‘No, no!’ in his, burst from her lips whenever he attempted to transfer the fan to her keeping. ‘These white women are most wonderful!’ thought Beppo, ready to stagger between perplexity and impatience.
‘There; in there!’ said Aennchen, pointing to a light that came through the folds of a curtain. Beppo kissed her fingers as they tugged unreluctantly in his clutch, and knew by a little pause that the case was hopeful for higher privileges. What to do? He had not an instant to spare; yet he dared not offend a woman’s vanity. He gave an ecstatic pressure of her hand upon his breastbone, to let her be sure she was adored, albeit not embraced. After this act of prudence he went toward the curtain, while the fair Austrian soubrette flew on her previous errand.
It was enough that Beppo found himself in a dark antechamber for him to be instantly scrupulous in his footing and breathing. As he touched the curtain, a door opened on the other side of the interior, and a tender gabble of fresh feminine voices broke the stillness and ran on like a brook coming from leaps to a level, and again leaping and making noise of joy. The Duchess of Graatli had clasped the Signora Laura’s two hands and drawn her to an ottoman, and between kissings and warmer claspings, was questioning of the little ones, Giacomo and her goddaughter Amalia.
‘When, when did I see you last?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh! not since we met that morning to lay our immortelles upon his tomb. My soul’s sister! kiss me, remembering it. I saw you in the gateway—it seemed to me, as in a vision, that we had both had one warning to come for him, and knock, and the door would be opened, and our beloved would come forth! That was many days back. It is to me like a day locked up forever in a casket of pearl. Was it not an unstained morning, my own! If I weep, it is with pleasure. But,’ she added with precipitation, ‘weeping of any kind will not do for these eyelids of mine.’ And drawing forth a tiny gold-framed pocket-mirror she perceived convincingly that it would not do.
‘They will think it is for the absence of my husband,’ she said, as only a woman can say it who deplores nothing so little as that.
‘When does he return from Vienna?’ Laura inquired in the fallen voice of her thoughtfulness.
‘I receive two couriers a week; I know not any more, my Laura. I believe he is pushing some connubial complaint against me at the Court. We have been married seventeen months. I submitted to the marriage because I could get no proper freedom without, and now I am expected to abstain from the very thing I sacrificed myself to get! Can he hear that in Vienna?’ She snapped her fingers. ‘If not, let him come and behold it in Milan. Besides, he is harmless. The Archduchess is all ears for the very man of whom he is jealous. This is my reply: You told me to marry: I obeyed. My heart ‘s in the earth, and I must have distractions. My present distraction is De Pyrmont, a good Catholic and a good Austrian soldier, though a Frenchman. I grieve to say—it’s horrible—that it sometimes tickles me when I reflect that De Pyrmont is keen with the sword. But remember, Laura, it was not until after our marriage my husband told me he could have saved Giacomo by the lifting of a finger. Away with the man!—if it amuses me to punish him, I do so.’
The duchess kissed Laura’s cheek, and continued:—‘Now to the point where we stand enemies! I am for Austria, you are for Italy. Good. But I am always for Laura. So, there’s a river between us and a bridge across it. My darling, do you know that we are much too strong for you, if you mean anything serious tomorrow night?’
‘Are you?’ Laura said calmly.
‘I know, you see, that something is meant to happen to-morrow night.’
Laura said, ‘Do you?’
‘We have positive evidence of it. More than that: Your Vittoria—but do you care to have her warned? She will certainly find herself in a pitfall if she insists on carrying out her design. Tell me, do you care to have her warned and shielded? A year of fortress-life is not agreeable, is not beneficial for the voice. Speak, my Laura.’
Laura looked up in the face of her friend mildly with her large dark eyes, replying, ‘Do you think of sending Major de Pyrmont to her to warn her?’
‘Are you not wicked?’ cried the duchess, feeling that she blushed, and that Laura had thrown her off the straight road of her interrogation. ‘But, play cards with open hands, my darling, to-night. Look:—She is in danger. I know it; so do you. She will be imprisoned perhaps before she steps on the boards—who knows? Now, I—are not my very dreams all sworn in a regiment to serve my Laura?—I have a scheme. Truth, it is hardly mine. It belongs to the Greek, the Signor Antonio Pericles Agriolopoulos. It is simply’—the duchess dropped her voice out of Beppo’s hearing—‘a scheme to rescue her: speed her away to my chateau near Meran in Tyrol.’ ‘Tyrol’ was heard by Beppo. In his frenzy at the loss of the context he indulged in a yawn, and a grimace, and a dance of disgust all in one; which lost him the next sentence likewise. ‘There we purpose keeping her till all is quiet and her revolutionary fever has passed. Have you heard of this Signor Antonio? He could buy up the kingdom of Greece, all Tyrol, half Lombardy. The man has a passion for your Vittoria; for her voice solely, I believe. He is considered, no doubt truly, a great connoisseur. He could have a passion for nothing else, or alas!’ (the duchess shook her head with doleful drollery) ‘would he insist on written securities and mortgages of my private property when he lends me money? How different the world is from the romances, my Laura! But for De Pyrmont, I might fancy my smile was really incapable of ransoming an empire; I mean an emperor. Speak; the man is waiting to come; shall I summon him?’
Laura gave an acquiescent nod.
By this time Beppo had taken root to the floor. ‘I am in the best place after all,’ he said, thinking of the duties of his service. He was perfectly well acquainted with the features of the Signor Antonio. He knew that Luigi was the Signor Antonio’s spy upon Vittoria, and that no personal harm was intended toward his mistress; but Beppo’s heart was in the revolt of which Vittoria was to give the signal; so, without a touch of animosity, determined to thwart him, Beppo waited to hear the Signor Antonio’s scheme.
The Greek was introduced by Aennchen. She glanced at the signora’s lap, and seeing her still without her fan, her eye shot slyly up with her shining temple, inspecting the narrow opening in the curtain furtively. A short hush of preluding ceremonies passed.
Presently Beppo heard them speaking; he was aghast to find that he had no comprehension of what they were uttering. ‘Oh, accursed French dialect!’ he groaned; discovering the talk to be in that tongue. The Signor Antonio warmed rapidly from the frigid politeness of his introductory manner. A consummate acquaintance with French was required to understand him. He held out the fingers of one hand in regimental order, and with the others, which alternately screwed his moustache from its constitutional droop over the corners of his mouth, he touched the uplifted digits one by one, buzzing over them: flashing his white eyes, and shrugging in a way sufficient to madden a surreptitious listener who was aware that a wealth of meaning escaped him and mocked at him. At times the Signor Antonio pitched a note compounded half of cursing, half of crying, it seemed: both pathetic and objurgative, as if he whimpered anathemas and had inexpressible bitter things in his mind. But there was a remedy! He displayed the specific on a third finger. It was there. This being done (number three on the fingers), matters might still be well. So much his electric French and gesticulations plainly asserted. Beppo strained all his attention for names, in despair at the riddle of the signs. Names were pillars of light in the dark unintelligible waste. The signora put a question. It was replied to with the name of the Maestro Rocco Ricci. Following that, the Signor Antonio accompanied his voluble delivery with pantomimic action which seemed to indicate the shutting of a door and an instantaneous galloping of horses—a flight into air, any-whither. He whipped the visionary steeds with enthusiastic glee, and appeared to be off skyward like a mad poet, when the signora again put a question, and at once he struck his hand flat across his mouth, and sat postured to answer what she pleased with a glare of polite vexation. She spoke; he echoed her, and the duchess took up the same phrase. Beppo was assisted by the triangular recurrence of the words and their partial relationship to Italian to interpret them: ‘This night.’ Then the signora questioned further. The Greek replied: ‘Mademoiselle Irma di Karski.’
‘La Lazzeruola,’ she said.
The Signor Antonio flashed a bit of sarcastic mimicry, as if acquiescing in the justice of the opprobrious term from the high point of view: but mademoiselle might pass, she was good enough for the public.
Beppo heard and saw no more. A tug from behind recalled him to his situation. He put out his arms and gathered Aennchen all dark in them: and first kissing her so heartily as to set her trembling on the verge of a betrayal, before she could collect her wits he struck the fan down the pretty hollow of her back, between her shoulder-blades, and bounded away. It was not his intention to rush into the embrace of Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz, but that perambulating chasseur received him in a semi-darkness where all were shadows, and exclaimed, ‘Aennchen!’ Beppo gave an endearing tenderness to the few words of German known to him: ‘Gottschaf-donner-dummer!’ and slipped from the hold of the astonished Jacob, sheer under his arm-pit. He was soon in the street, excited he knew not by what, or for what object. He shuffled the names he remembered to have just heard—‘Rocco Ricci, and ‘la Lazzeruola.’ Why did the name of la Lazzeruola come in advance of la Vittoria? And what was the thing meant by ‘this night,’ which all three had uttered as in an agreement?—ay! and the Tyrol! The Tyrol—this night-Rocco Ricci la Lazzeruola!
Beppo’s legs were carrying him toward the house of the Maestro Rocco Ricci ere he had arrived at any mental decision upon these imminent mysteries.
CHAPTER XIV
AT THE MAESTRO’S DOOR
The house of the Maestro Rocco Ricci turned off the Borgo della Stella. Carlo Ammiani conducted Vittoria to the maestro’s door. They conversed very little on the way.
‘You are a good swordsman?’ she asked him abruptly.
‘I have as much skill as belongs to a perfect intimacy with the weapon,’ he answered.
‘Your father was a soldier, Signor Carlo.’
‘He was a General officer in what he believed to be the army of Italy. We used to fence together every day for two hours.’
‘I love the fathers who do that,’ said Vittoria.
After such speaking Ammiani was not capable of the attempt to preach peace and safety to her. He postponed it to the next minute and the next.
Vittoria’s spirit was in one of those angry knots which are half of the intellect, half of the will, and are much under the domination of one or other of the passions in the ascendant. She was resolved to go forward; she felt justified in going forward; but the divine afflatus of enthusiasm buoyed her no longer, and she required the support of all that accuracy of insight and that senseless stubbornness which there might be in her nature. The feeling that it was she to whom it was given to lift the torch and plant the standard of Italy, had swept her as through the strings of a harp. Laura, and the horrible little bronze butterfly, and the ‘Sei sospetta,’ now made her duty seem dry and miserably fleshless, imaging itself to her as if a skeleton had been told to arise and walk:—say, the thing obeys, and fills a ghastly distension of men’s eyelids for a space, and again lies down, and men get their breath: but who is the rosier for it? where is the glory of it? what is the good? This Milan, and Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Brescia, Venice, Florence, the whole Venetian, Tuscan, and Lombardic lands, down to far Sicily, and that Rome which always lay under the crown of a dead sunset in her idea—they too might rise; but she thought of them as skeletons likewise. Even the shadowy vision of Italy Free had no bloom on it, and stood fronting the blown trumpets of resurrection Lazarus-like.
At these moments young hearts, though full of sap and fire, cannot do common nursing labour for the little suckling sentiments and hopes, the dreams, the languors and the energies hanging about them for nourishment. Vittoria’s horizon was within five feet of her. She saw neither splendid earth nor ancient heaven; nothing save a breach to be stepped over in defiance of foes and (what was harder to brave) of friends. Some wayward activity of old associations set her humming a quaint English tune, by which she was brought to her consciousness.
‘Dear friend,’ she said, becoming aware that there might be a more troubled depth in Ammiani’s absence of speech than in her own.
‘Yes?’ said he, quickly, as for a sentence to follow. None came, and he continued, ‘The Signora Laura is also your friend.’
She rejoined coldly, ‘I am not thinking of her.’
Vittoria had tried to utter what might be a word of comfort for him, and she found she had not a thought or an emotion. Here she differed from Laura, who, if the mood to heal a favourite’s little sore at any season came upon her, would shower out lively tendernesses and all cajoleries possible to the tongue of woman. Yet the irritation of action narrowed Laura more than it did Vittoria; fevered her and distracted her sympathies. Being herself a plaything at the time, she could easily play a part for others. Vittoria had not grown, probably never would grow, to be so plastic off the stage. She was stringing her hand to strike a blow as men strike, and women when they do that cannot be quite feminine.
‘How dull the streets are,’ she remarked.
‘They are, just now,’ said Ammiani, thinking of them on the night to come convulsed with strife, and of her, tossed perhaps like a weed along the torrent of bloody deluge waters. Her step was so firm, her face so assured, that he could not fancy she realized any prospect of the sort, and it filled him with pity and a wretched quailing.
If I speak now I shall be talking like a coward, he said to himself: and he was happily too prudent to talk to her in that strain. So he said nothing of peace and safety. She was almost at liberty to believe that he approved the wisdom of her resolution. At the maestro’s door she thanked him for his escort, and begged for it further within an hour. ‘And do bring me some chocolate.’ She struck her teeth together champing in a pretty hunger for it. ‘I have no chocolate in my pocket, and I hardly know myself.’
‘What will your Signor Antonio say?’
Vittoria filliped her fingers. ‘His rule is over, and he is my slave: I am not his. I will not eat much; but some some I must have.’
Ammiani laughed and promised to obtain it. ‘That is, if there’s any to be had.’
‘Break open doors to get it for me,’ she said, stamping with fun to inspirit him.
No sooner was she standing alone, than her elbow was gently plucked at on the other side: a voice was sibilating: ‘S-s-signorina.’ She allowed herself to be drawn out of the light of the open doorway, having no suspicion and no fear. ‘Signorina, here is chocolate.’ She beheld two hands in cup-shape, surcharged with packets of Turin chocolate.
‘Lugi, it is you?’
The Motterone spy screwed his eyelids to an expression of the shrewdest secresy.
‘Hist! signorina. Take some. You shall have all, but wait:—by-and-by. Aha! you look at my eyes as you did on the Monterone, because one of them takes the shoulder-view; but, the truth is, my father was a contrabandist, and had his eye in his ear when the frontier guard sent a bullet through his back, cotton-bags and cutleries, and all! I inherit from him, and have been wry-eyed ever since. How does that touch a man’s honesty, signorina? Not at all. Don’t even suspect that you won’t appreciate Luigi by-and-by. So, you won’t ask me a word, signorina, but up you go to the maestro:—signorina, I swear I am your faithful servant—up to the maestro, and down first. Come down first not last:—first. Let the other one come down after you; and you come down first. Leave her behind, la Lazzeruola; and here, ‘Luigi displayed a black veil, the common head-dress of the Milanese women, and twisted his fingers round and round on his forehead to personate the horns of the veil; ‘take it, signorina; you know how to wear it. Luigi and the saints watch over you.’ Vittoria found herself left in possession of the veil and a packet of chocolate.
‘If I am watched over by the saints and Luigi,’ she thought, and bit at the chocolate.
When the door had closed upon her, Luigi resumed his station near it, warily casting his glances along the house-fronts, and moving his springy little legs like a heath-cock alert. They carried him sharp to an opposite corner of the street at a noise of some one running exposed to all eyes right down the middle of the road, straight to the house: in which foolish person he discerned Beppo, all of whose proceedings Luigi observed and commented on from the safe obscurity under eaves and starlight, while Beppo was in the light of the lamps. ‘You thunder at the door, my Beppo. You are a fire-balloon: you are going to burn yourself up with what you carry. You think you can do something, because you read books and frequent the talking theatres—fourteen syllables to a word. Mother of heaven! will you never learn anything from natural intelligence? There you are, in at the door. And now you will disturb the signorina, and you will do nothing but make la Lazzeruola’s ears lively. Bounce! you are up the stairs. Bounce! you are on the landing. Thrum! you drum at the door, and they are singing; they don’t hear you. And now you’re meek as a mouse. That’s it—if you don’t hit the mark when you go like a bullet, you ‘re stupid as lead. And they call you a clever fellow! Luigi’s day is to come. When all have paid him all round, they will acknowledge Luigi’s worth. You are honest enough, my Beppo; but you might as well be a countryman. You are the signorina’s servant, but I know the turnings, said the rat to the cavaliere weazel.’
In a few minutes Beppo stepped from the house, and flung himself with his back against the lintel of the doorway.
‘That looks like determination to stop on guard,’ said Luigi.
He knew the exact feeling expressed by it, when one has come violently on an errand and has done no good.
‘A flea, my feathery lad, will set you flying again.’
As it was imperative in Luigi’s schemes that Beppo should be set flying again, he slipped away stealthily, and sped fast into the neighbouring Corso, where a light English closed carriage, drawn by a pair of the island horses, moved at a slow pace. Two men were on the driver’s seat, one of whom Luigi hailed to come down then he laid a strip of paper on his knee, and after thumping on the side of his nose to get a notion of English-Italian, he wrote with a pencil, dancing upon one leg all the while for a balance:—
‘Come, Beppo, daughter sake, now, at once, immediate,
Beppo, signor.’
‘That’s to the very extremity how the little signora Inglese would write,’ said Luigi; yet cogitating profoundly in a dubitative twinkle of a second as to whether it might not be the English habit to wind up a hasty missive with an expediting oath. He had heard the oath of emphasis in that island: but he decided to let it go as it stood. The man he had summoned was directed to take it straightway and deliver it to one who would be found at the house-door of the Maestro Rocco Ricci.
‘Thus, like a drunken sentinel,’ said Luigi, folding his arms, crossing his legs, and leaning back. ‘Forward, Matteo, my cherub.’
‘All goes right?’ the coachman addressed Luigi.
‘As honey, as butter, as a mulberry leaf with a score of worms on it! The wine and the bread and the cream-cheeses are inside, my dainty one, are they? She must not starve, nor must I. Are our hampers fastened out side? Good. We shall be among the Germans in a day and a night. I ‘ve got the route, and I pronounce the name of the chateau very perfectly—“Schloss Sonnenberg.” Do that if you can.’
The unpractised Italian coachman declined to attempt it. He and Luigi compared time by their watches. In three-quarters of an hour he was to be within hail of the maestro’s house. Thither Luigi quietly returned.
Beppo’s place there was vacant.
‘That’s better than a draught of Asti,’ said Luigi.
The lighted windows of the maestro’s house, and the piano striking corrective notes, assured him that the special rehearsal was still going on; and as he might now calculate on two or three minutes to spare, he threw back his coat-collar, lifted his head, and distended his chest, apparently to chime in with the singing, but simply to listen to it. For him, it was imperative that he should act the thing, in order to apprehend and appreciate it.
A hurried footing told of the approach of one whom he expected.
‘Luigi!’
‘Here, padrone.’
‘You have the chocolate?’
‘Signor Antonio, I have deposited it in the carriage.’
‘She is in up there?’
‘I beheld her entering.’
‘Good; that is fixed fact.’ The Signor Antonio drove at his moustache right and left. ‘I give you, see, Italian money and German money: German money in paper; and a paper written out by me to explain the value of the German paper-money. Silence, engine that you are, and not a man! I am preventive of stupidity, I am? Do I not know that, hein? Am I in need of the acclamation of you, my friend? On to the Chateau Sonnenberg:—drive on, drive on, and one who stops you, you drive over him: the gendarmes in white will peruse this paper, if there is any question, and will pass you and the cage, bowing; you hear? It is a pass; the military pass you when you show this paper. My good friend, Captain Weisspriess, on the staff of General Pierson, gives it, signed, and it is effectual. But you lose not the paper: put it away with the paper-money, quite safe. For yourself, this is half your pay—I give you napoleons; ten. Count. And now—once at the Chateau Sonnenberg, I repeat, you leave her in charge of two persons, one a woman, at the gate, and then back—frrrrr....’
Antonio-Pericles smacked on the flat of his hand, and sounded a rapid course of wheels.
‘Back, and drop not a crumb upon the road. You have your map. It is, after Roveredo, straight up the Adige, by Bolzano… say “Botzen.”’
‘“Botz,”’ said Luigi, submissively.
‘“Botz”—“Botz”—ass! fool! double idiot! “Botzon!”’ Antonio-Pericles corrected him furiously, exclaiming to the sovereign skies, ‘Though I pay for brains, can I get them! No. But make a fiasco, Luigi, and not a second ten for you, my friend: and away, out of my sight, show yourself no more!’
Luigi humbly said that he was not the instrument of a fiasco.
Half spurning him, Antonio-Pericles snarled an end both to his advices and his prophetic disgust of the miserable tools furnished unto masterly minds upon this earth. He paced forward and back, murmuring in French, ‘Mon Dieu! was there ever such a folly as in the head of this girl? It is her occasion:—Shall I be a Star? Shall I be a Cinder? It is tomorrow night her moment of Birth! No; she prefers to be extinguished. For what? For this thing she calls her country. It is infamous. Yes, vile little cheat! But, do you know Antonio-Pericles? Not yet. I will nourish you, I will imprison you: I will have you tortured by love, by the very devil of love, by the red-hot pincers of love, till you scream a music, and die to melt him with your voice, and kick your country to the gutter, and know your Italy for a birthplace and a cradle of Song, and no more, and enough! Bah!’
Having thus delivered himself of the effervescence of his internal agitation, he turned sharply round upon Luigi, with a military stamp of the foot and shout of the man’s name.