Aldrich Thomas Bailey
A Midnight Fantasy
There he lodged himself, as became a gentleman of fortune, in a suite of chambers in a comfortable palace overlooking the swift-flowing Adige—a riotous yellow stream that cut the town into two parts, and was spanned here and there by rough-hewn stone bridges, which it sometimes sportively washed away. It was a brave old town that had stood sieges and plagues, and was full of mouldy, picturesque buildings and a gayety that has since grown somewhat mouldy. A goodly place to rest in for the wayworn pilgrim! He dimly recollected that he had letters to one or two illustrious families; but he cared not to deliver them at once. It was pleasant to stroll about the city, unknown. There were sights to see: the Roman amphitheatre, and the churches with their sculptured sarcophagi and saintly relics—interesting joints and saddles of martyrs, and enough fragments of the true cross to build a ship. The life in the piazze and on the streets, the crowds in the shops, the pageants, the lights, the stir, the color, all mightily took the eye of the young Dane. He was in a mood to be amused. Everything diverted him—the faint pulsing of a guitar-string in an adjacent garden at midnight, or the sharp clash of gleaming sword blades under his window, when the Montecchi and the Cappelletti chanced to encounter each other in the narrow footway.
Meanwhile, Hamlet brushed up his Italian. He was well versed in the literature of the language, particularly in its dramatic literature, and had long meditated penning a gloss to “The Murther of Gonzago,” a play which Hamlet held in deservedly high estimation.
He made acquaintances, too. In the same palace where he sojourned lived a very valiant soldier and wit, a kinsman to Prince Escalus, one Mercutio by name, with whom Hamlet exchanged civilities on the staircase at first, and then fell into companionship.
A number of Verona’s noble youths, poets and light-hearted men-about-town, frequented Mercutio’s chambers, and with these Hamlet soon became on terms.
Among the rest were an agreeable gentleman, with hazel eyes, named Benvolio, and a gallant young fellow called Romeo, whom Mercutio bantered pitilessly and loved heartily. This Romeo, who belonged to one of the first families, was a very susceptible spark, which the slightest breath of a pretty woman was sufficient to blow into flame. To change the metaphor, he fell from one love affair into another as easily and logically as a ripe pomegranate drops from a bough. He was generally unlucky in these matters, curiously enough, for he was a handsome youth in his saffron satin doublet slashed with black, and his jaunty velvet bonnet with its trailing plume of ostrich feather.
At the time of Hamlet’s coming to Verona, Romeo was in a great despair of love in consequence of an unrequited passion for a certain lady of the city, between whose family and his own a deadly feud had existed for centuries. Somebody had stepped on somebody else’s lap-dog in the far ages, and the two families had been slashing and hacking at each other ever since. It appeared that Romeo had scaled a garden wall, one night, and broken upon the meditations of his inamorata, who, as chance would have it, was sitting on her balcony enjoying the moonrise. No lady could be insensible to such devotion, for it would have been death to Romeo if any of her kinsmen had found him in that particular locality. Some tender phrases passed between them, perhaps; but the lady was flurried, taken unawares, and afterwards, it seemed, altered her mind, and would have no further commerce with the Montague. This business furnished Mercutio’s quiver with innumerable sly shafts, which Romeo received for the most part in good humor.
With these three gentlemen—Mercutio, Benvolio, and Romeo—Hamlet saw life in Verona, as young men will see life wherever they happen to be. Many a time the nightingale ceased singing and the lark began before they were abed; but perhaps it is not wise to inquire too closely into this. A month had slipped away since Hamlet’s arrival; the hyacinths were opening in the gardens, and it was spring.
One morning, as he and Mercutio were lounging arm in arm on a bridge near their lodgings, they met a knave in livery puzzling over a parchment which he was plainly unable to decipher.
“Read it aloud, friend!” cried Mercutio, who always had a word to throw away.
“I would I could read it at all. I pray, sir, can you read?”
“With ease—if it is not my tailor’s score;” and Mercutio took the parchment, which ran as follows:—
“Signior Martino, and his wife and daughters; County Ansdmo, and his beauteous sisters; the lady widow Vitrumo; Signior Placentio, and his lovely nieces; Mercutio, and his brother Valentine; mine uncle Capulet, his wife and daughters; my fair niece Rosaline; Livia; Signior Valentio, and his cousin Tybalt; Lucio, and the lively Helena.”
“A very select company, with the exception of that rogue Mercutio,” said the soldier, laughing. “What does it mean?”
“My master, the Signior Capulet, gives a ball and supper to-night; these the guests; I am his man Peter, and if you be not one of the house of Montague, I pray come and crush a cup of wine with us. Rest you merry;” and the knave, having got his billet deciphered for him, made off.
“One must needs go, being asked by both man and master; but since I am asked doubly, I ‘ll not go singly; I ‘ll bring you with me, Hamlet. It is a masquerade; I have had wind of it. The flower of the city will be there—all the high-bosomed roses and low-necked lilies.”
Hamlet had seen nothing of society in Verona, properly speaking, and did not require much urging to assent to Mercutio’s proposal, far from foreseeing that so slight a freak would have a fateful sequence.
It was late in the night when they presented themselves, in mask and domino, at the Capulet mansion. The music was at its sweetest and the torches were at their brightest, as the pair entered the dancing-hall. They had scarcely crossed the threshold when Hamlet’s eyes rested upon a lady clad in a white silk robe, who held to her features, as she moved through the figure of the dance, a white satin mask, on each side of which was disclosed so much of the rosy oval of her face as made one long to look upon the rest. The ornaments this lady wore were pearls; her fan and slippers, like the robe and mask, were white—nothing but white. Her eyes shone almost black contrasted with the braids of warm gold hair that glistened through a misty veil of Venetian stuff, which floated about her from time to time and enveloped her, as the blossoms do a tree. Hamlet could think of nothing but the almond-tree that stood in full bloom in the little cortile near his lodging. She seemed to him the incarnation of that exquisite spring-time which had touched and awakened all the leaves and buds in the sleepy old gardens around Verona.
“Mercutio! who is that lady?”
“The daughter of old Capulet, by her stature.”
“And he that dances with her?”
“Paris, a kinsman to Can Grande della Scala.”
“Her lover?”
“One of them.”
“She has others?”
“Enough to make a squadron; only the blind and aged are exempt.”
Here the music ceased and the dancers dispersed. Hamlet followed the lady with his eyes, and, seeing her left alone a moment, approached her. She received him graciously, as a mask receives a mask, and the two fell to talking, as people do who—have nothing to say to each other and possess the art of saying it. Presently something in his voice struck on her ear, a new note, an intonation sweet and strange, that made her curious. Who was it? It could not be Valentine, nor Anselmo; he was too tall for Signior Placentio, not stout enough for Lucio; it was not her cousin Tybalt. Could it be that rash Montague who—Would he dare? Here, on the very points of their swords? The stream of maskers ebbed and flowed and surged around them, and the music began again, and Juliet listened and listened.
