George Meredith
Vittoria. Complete
CHAPTER XXXVII
ON LAGO MAGGIORE
Carlo’s hours were passed chiefly across the lake, in the Piedmontese valleys. When at Pallanza he was restless, and he shunned the two or three minutes of privacy with his betrothed which the rigorous Italian laws besetting courtship might have allowed him to take. He had perpetually the look of a man starting from wine. It was evident that he and Countess d’Isorella continued to hold close communication, for she came regularly to the villa to meet him. On these occasions Countess Ammiani accorded her one ceremonious interview, and straightway locked herself in her room. Violetta’s grace of ease and vivacity soared too high to be subject to any hostile judgement of her character. She seemed to rely entirely on the force of her beauty, and to care little for those who did not acknowledge it. She accepted public compliments quite royally, nor was Agostino backward in offering them. “And you have a voice, you know,” he sometimes said aside to Vittoria; but she had forgotten how easily she could swallow great praise of her voice; she had almost forgotten her voice. Her delight was to hang her head above inverted mountains in the lake, and dream that she was just something better than the poorest of human creatures. She could not avoid putting her mind in competition with this brilliant woman’s, and feeling eclipsed; and her weakness became pitiable. But Countess d’Isorella mentioned once that Pericles was at the Villa Ricciardi, projecting magnificent operatic entertainments. The reviving of a passion to sing possessed Vittoria like a thirst for freedom, and instantly confused all the reflected images within her, as the fury of a sudden wind from the high Alps scourges the glassy surface of the lake. She begged Countess Ammiani’s permission that she might propose to Pericles to sing in his private operatic company, in any part, at the shortest notice.
“You wish to leave me?” said the countess, and resolutely conceived it.
Speaking to her son on this subject, she thought it necessary to make some excuse for a singer’s instinct, who really did not live save on the stage. It amused Carlo; he knew when his mother was really angry with persons she tried to shield from the anger of others; and her not seeing the wrong on his side in his behaviour to his betrothed was laughable. Nevertheless she had divined the case more correctly than he: the lover was hurt. After what he had endured, he supposed, with all his forgiveness, that he had an illimitable claim upon his bride’s patience. He told his another to speak to her openly.
“Why not you, my Carlo?” said the countess.
“Because, mother, if I speak to her, I shall end by throwing out my arms and calling for the priest.”
“I would clap hands to that.”
“We will see; it may be soon or late, but it can’t be now.”
“How much am I to tell her, Carlo?”
“Enough to keep her from fretting.”
The countess then asked herself how much she knew. Her habit of receiving her son’s word and will as supreme kept her ignorant of anything beyond the outline of his plans; and being told to speak openly of them to another, she discovered that her acquiescing imagination supplied the chief part of her knowledge. She was ashamed also to have it thought, even by Carlo, that she had not gathered every detail of his occupation, so that she could not argue against him, and had to submit to see her dearest wishes lightly swept aside.
“I beg you to tell me what you think of Countess d’Isorella; not the afterthought,” she said to Vittoria.
“She is beautiful, dear Countess Ammiani.”
“Call me mother now and then. Yes; she is beautiful. She has a bad name.”
“Envy must have given it, I think.”
“Of course she provokes envy. But I say that her name is bad, as envy could not make it. She is a woman who goes on missions, and carries a husband into society like a passport. You have only thought of her beauty?”
“I can see nothing else,” said Vittoria, whose torture at the sight of the beauty was appeased by her disingenuous pleading on its behalf.
“In my time Beauty was a sinner,” the countess resumed. “My confessor has filled my ears with warnings that it is a net to the soul, a weapon for devils. May the saints of Paradise make bare the beauty of this woman. She has persuaded Carlo that she is serving the country. You have let him lie here alone in a fruitless bed, silly girl. He stayed for you while his comrades called him to Vercelli, where they are assembled. The man whom he salutes as his Chief gave him word to go there. They are bound for Rome. Ah me! Rome is a great name, but Lombardy is Carlo’s natal home, and Lombardy bleeds. You were absent—how long you were absent! If you could know the heaviness of those days of his waiting for you. And it was I who kept him here! I must have omitted a prayer, for he would have been at Vercelli now with Luciano and Emilio, and you might have gone to him; but he met this woman, who has convinced him that Piedmont will make a Winter march, and that his marriage must be delayed.” The countess raised her face and drooped her hands from the wrists, exclaiming, “If I have lately omitted one prayer, enlighten me, blessed heaven! I am blind; I cannot see for my son; I am quite blind. I do not love the woman; therefore I doubt myself. You, my daughter, tell me your thought of her, tell me what you think. Young eyes observe; young heads are sometimes shrewd in guessing.”
Vittoria said, after a pause, “I will believe her to be true, if she supports the king.” It was hardly truthful speaking on her part.
“How can Carlo have been persuaded!” the countess sighed.
“By me?” Victoria asked herself, and for a moment she was exulting.
She spoke from that emotion when it had ceased to animate her.
“Carlo was angry with the king. He echoed Agostino, but Agostino does not sting as he did, and Carlo cannot avoid seeing what the king has sacrificed. Perhaps the Countess d’Isorella has shown him promises of fresh aid in the king’s handwriting. Suffering has made Carlo Alberto one with the Republicans, if he had other ambitions once. And Carlo dedicates his blood to Lombardy: he does rightly. Dear countess—my mother! I have made him wait for me; I will be patient in waiting for him. I know that Countess d’Isorella is intimate with the king. There is a man named Barto Rizzo, who thinks me a guilty traitress, and she is making use of this man. That must be her reason for prohibiting the marriage. She cannot be false if she is capable of uniting extreme revolutionary agents and the king in one plot, I think; I do not know.” Vittoria concluded her perfect expression of confidence with this atoning doubtfulness.
Countess Ammiani obtained her consent that she would not quit her side.
After Violetta had gone, Carlo, though he shunned secret interviews, addressed his betrothed as one who was not strange to his occupation and the trial his heart was undergoing. She could not doubt that she was beloved, in spite of the colourlessness and tonelessness of a love that appealed to her intellect. He showed her a letter he had received from Laura, laughing at its abuse of Countess d’Isorella, and the sarcasms levelled at himself.
In this letter Laura said that she was engaged in something besides nursing.
Carlo pointed his finger to the sentence, and remarked, “I must have your promise—a word from you is enough—that you will not meddle with any intrigue.”
Vittoria gave the promise, half trusting it to bring the lost bloom of their love to him; but he received it as a plain matter of necessity. Certain of his love, she wondered painfully that it should continue so barren of music.
“Why am I to pledge myself that I will be useless?” she asked. “You mean, my Carlo, that I am to sit still, and watch, and wait.”
He answered, “I will tell you this much: I can be struck vitally through you. In the game I am playing, I am able to defend myself. If you enter it, distraction begins. Stay with my mother.”
“Am I to know nothing?”
“Everything—in good time.”
“I might—might I not help you, my Carlo?”
“Yes; and nobly too. And I show you the way.”
Agostino and Carlo made an expedition to Turin. Before he went, Carlo took her in his arms.
“Is it coming?” she said, shutting her eyelids like a child expecting the report of firearms.
He pressed his lips to the closed eyes. “Not yet; but are you growing timid?”
His voice seemed to reprove her.
She could have told him that keeping her in the dark among unknown terrors ruined her courage; but the minutes were too precious, his touch too sweet. In eyes and hands he had become her lover again. The blissful minutes rolled away like waves that keep the sunshine out at sea.
Her solitude in the villa was beguiled by the arrival of the score of an operatic scena, entitled “HAGAR,” by Rocco Ricci, which she fancied that either Carlo or her dear old master had sent, and she devoured it. She thought it written expressly for her. With HAGAR she communed during the long hours, and sang herself on to the verge of an imagined desert beyond the mountain-shadowed lake and the last view of her beloved Motterone. Hagar’s face of tears in the Brerawas known to her; and Hagar in her ‘Addio’ gave the living voice to that dumb one. Vittoria revelled in the delicious vocal misery. She expanded with the sorrow of poor Hagar, whose tears refreshed her, and parted her from her recent narrowing self-consciousness. The great green mountain fronted her like a living presence. Motterone supplied the place of the robust and venerable patriarch, whom she reproached, and worshipped, but with a fathomless burdensome sense of cruel injustice, deeper than the tears or the voice which spoke of it: a feeling of subjected love that was like a mother’s giving suck to a detested child. Countess Ammiani saw the abrupt alteration of her step and look with a dim surprise. “What do you conceal from me?” she asked, and supplied the answer by charitably attributing it to news that the signora Piaveni was coming.
When Laura came, the countess thanked her, saying, “I am a wretched companion for this boiling head.”
Laura soon proved to her that she had been the best, for after very few hours Vittoria was looking like the Hagar on the canvas.
A woman such as Violetta d’Isorella was of the sort from which Laura shrank with all her feminine power of loathing; but she spoke of her with some effort at personal tolerance until she heard of Violetta’s stipulation for the deferring of Carlo’s marriage, and contrived to guess that Carlo was reserved and unfamiliar with his betrothed. Then she cried out, “Fool that he is! Is it ever possible to come to the end of the folly of men? She has inflamed his vanity. She met him when you were holding him waiting, and no doubt she commenced with lamentations over the country, followed by a sigh, a fixed look, a cheerful air, and the assurance to him that she knew it—uttered as if through the keyhole of the royal cabinet—she knew that Sardinia would break the Salasco armistice in a mouth:—if only, if the king could be sure of support from the youth of Lombardy.”
“Do you suspect the unhappy king?” Vittoria interposed.
“Grasp your colours tight,” said Laura, nodding sarcastic approbation of such fidelity, and smiling slightly. “There has been no mention of the king. Countess d’Isorella is a spy and a tool of the Jesuits, taking pay from all parties—Austria as well, I would swear. Their object is to paralyze the march on Rome, and she has won Carlo for them. I am told that Barto Rizzo is another of her conquests. Thus she has a madman and a fool, and what may not be done with a madman and a fool? However, I have set a watch on her. She must have inflamed Carlo’s vanity. He has it, just as they all have. There’s trickery: I would rather behold the boy charging at the head of a column than putting faith in this base creature. She must have simulated well,” Laura went on talking to herself.
“What trickery?” said Vittoria.
“He was in love with the woman when he was a lad,” Laura replied, and pertinently to Vittoria’s feelings. This threw the moist shade across her features.
Beppo in Turin and Luigi on the lake were the watch set on Countess d’Isorella; they were useless except to fortify Laura’s suspicions. The Duchess of Graatli wrote mere gossip from Milan. She mentioned that Anna of Lenkenstein had visited with her the tomb of her brother Count Paul at Bologna, and had returned in double mourning; and that Madame Sedley—“the sister of our poor ruined Pierson”—had obtained grace, for herself at least, from Anna, by casting herself at Anna’s feet,—and that they were now friends.
Vittoria felt ashamed of Adela.
When Carlo returned, the signora attacked him boldly with all her weapons; reproached him; said, “Would my husband have treated me in such a manner?” Carlo twisted his moustache and stroked his young beard for patience. They passed from room to balcony and terrace, and Laura brought him back into company without cessation of her fire of questions and sarcasms, saying, “No, no; we will speak of these things publicly.” She appealed alternately to Agostino, Vittoria, and Countess Ammiani for support, and as she certainly spoke sense, Carlo was reduced to gloom and silence. Laura then paused. “Surely you have punished your bride enough?” she said; and more softly, “Brother of my Giacomo! you are under an evil spell.”
Carlo started up in anger. Bending to Vittoria, he offered her his hand to lead her out, They went together.
“A good sign,” said the countess.
“A bad sign!” Laura sighed. “If he had taken me out for explanation! But tell me, my Agostino, are you the woman’s dupe?”
“I have been,” Agostino admitted frankly.
“You did really put faith in her?”
“She condescends to be so excessively charming.”
“You could not advance a better reason.”
“It is one of our best; perhaps our very best, where your sex is concerned, signora.”
“You are her dupe no more?”
“No more. Oh, dear no!”
“You understand her now, do you?”
“For the very reason, signora, that I have been her dupe. That is, I am beginning to understand her. I am not yet in possession of the key.”
“Not yet in possession!” said Laura contemptuously; “but, never mind. Now for Carlo.”
“Now for Carlo. He declares that he never has been deceived by her.”
“He is perilously vain,” sighed the signora.
“Seriously”—Agostino drew out the length of his beard—“I do not suppose that he has been—boys, you know, are so acute. He fancies he can make her of service, and he shows some skill.”
“The skill of a fish to get into the net!”
“My dearest signora, you do not allow for the times. I remember”—Agostino peered upward through his eyelashes in a way that he had—“I remember seeing in a meadow a gossamer running away with a spider-thread. It was against all calculation. But, observe: there were exterior agencies at work: a stout wind blew. The ordinary reckoning is based on calms. Without the operation of disturbing elements, the spider-thread would have gently detained the gossamer.”
“Is that meant for my son?” Countess Ammiani asked slowly, with incredulous emphasis.
Agostino and Laura, laughing in their hearts at the mother’s mysterious veneration for Carlo, had to explain that ‘gossamer’ was a poetic, generic term, to embrace the lighter qualities of masculine youth.
A woman’s figure passed swiftly by the window, which led Laura to suppose that the couple outside had parted. She ran forth, calling to one of them, but they came hand in hand, declaring that they had seen neither woman nor man. “And I am happy,” Vittoria whispered. She looked happy, pale though she was.
“It is only my dreadful longing for rest which makes me pale,” she said to Laura, when they were alone. “Carlo has proved to me that he is wiser than I am.”
“A proof that you love Carlo, perhaps,” Laura rejoined.
“Dearest, he speaks more gently of the king.”
“It may be cunning, or it may be carelessness.”
“Will nothing satisfy you, wilful sceptic? He is quite alive to the Countess d’Isorella’s character. He told me how she dazzled him once.”
“Not how she has entangled him now?”
“It is not true. He told me what I should like to dream over without talking any more to anybody. Ah, what a delight! to have known him, as you did, when he was a boy. Can one who knew him then mean harm to him? I am not capable of imagining it. No; he will not abandon poor broken Lombardy, and he is right; and it is my duty to sit and wait. No shadow shall come between us. He has said it, and I have said it. We have but one thing to fear, which is contemptible to fear; so I am at peace.”
“Love-sick,” was Laura’s mental comment. Yet when Carlo explained his position to her next day, she was milder in her condemnation of him, and even admitted that a man must be guided by such brains as he possesses. He had conceived that his mother had a right to claim one month from him at the close of the war; he said this reddening. Laura nodded. He confessed that he was irritated when he met the Countess d’Isorella, with whom, to his astonishment, he found Barto Rizzo. She had picked him up, weak from a paroxysm, on the high-road to Milan. “And she tamed the brute,” said Carlo, in admiration of her ability; “she saw that he was plot-mad, and she set him at work on a stupendous plot; agents running nowhere, and scribblings concentring in her work-basket. You smile at me, as if I were a similar patient, signora. But I am my own agent. I have personally seen all my men in Turin and elsewhere. Violetta has not one grain of love for her country; but she can be made to serve it. As for me, I have gone too far to think of turning aside and drilling with Luciano. He may yet be diverted from Rome, to strike another blow for Lombardy. The Chief, I know, has some religious sentiment about Rome. So might I have; it is the Head of Italy. Let us raise the body first. And we have been beaten here. Great Gods! we will have another fight for it on the same spot, and quickly. Besides, I cannot face Luciano and tell him why I was away from him in the dark hour. How can I tell him that I was lingering to bear a bride to the altar? while he and the rest—poor fellows! Hard enough to have to mention it to you, signora!”
She understood his boyish sense of shame. Making smooth allowances for a feeling natural to his youth and the circumstances, she said, “I am your sister, for you were my husband’s brother in arms, Carlo. We two speak heart to heart: I sometimes fancy you have that voice: you hurt me with it more than you know; gladden me too! My Carlo, I wish to hear why Countess d’Isorella objects to your marriage.”
“She does not object.”
“An answer that begins by quibbling is not propitious. She opposes it.”
“For this reason: you have not forgotten the bronze butterfly?”
“I see more clearly,” said Laura, with a start.
“There appears to be no cure for the brute’s mad suspicion of her,” Carlo pursued: “and he is powerful among the Milanese. If my darling takes my name, he can damage much of my influence, and—you know what there is to be dreaded from a fanatic.”
Laura nodded, as if in full agreement with him, and said, after meditating a minute, “What sort of a lover is this!”
She added a little laugh to the singular interjection.
“Yes, I have also thought of a secret marriage,” said Carlo, stung by her penetrating instinct so that he was enabled to read the meaning in her mind.
“The best way, when you are afflicted by a dilemma of such a character, my Carlo,” the signora looked at him, “is to take a chess-table and make your moves on it. ‘King—my duty;’ ‘Queen—my passion;’ ‘Bishop—my social obligation;’ ‘Knight—my what-you-will and my round-the-corner wishes.’ Then, if you find that queen may be gratified without endangering king, and so forth, why, you may follow your inclinations; and if not, not. My Carlo, you are either enviably cool, or you are an enviable hypocrite.”
“The matter is not quite so easily settled as that,” said Carlo.
On the whole, though against her preconception, Laura thought him an honest lover, and not the player of a double game. She saw that Vittoria should have been with him in the critical hour of defeat, when his passions were down, and heaven knows what weakness of our common manhood, that was partly pride, partly love-craving, made his nature waxen to every impression; a season, as Laura knew, when the mistress of a loyal lover should not withhold herself from him. A nature tender like Carlo’s, and he bearing an enamoured heart, could not, as Luciano Romara had done, pass instantly from defeat to drill. And vain as Carlo was (the vanity being most intricate and subtle, like a nervous fluid), he was very open to the belief that he could diplomatize as well as fight, and lead a movement yet better than follow it. Even so the signora tried to read his case.
They were all, excepting Countess Ammiani (“who will never, I fear, do me this honour,” Violetta wrote, and the countess said, “Never,” and quoted a proverb), about to pass three or four days at the villa of Countess d’Isorella. Before they set out, Vittoria received a portentous envelope containing a long scroll, that was headed “YOUR CRIMES,” and detailing a lest of her offences against the country, from the revelation of the plot in her first letter to Wilfrid, to services rendered to the enemy during the war, up to the departure of Charles Albert out of forsaken Milan.
“B. R.” was the undisguised signature at the end of the scroll.
Things of this description restored her old war-spirit to Vittoria. She handed the scroll to Laura; Laura, in great alarm, passed it on to Carlo. He sent for Angelo Guidascarpi in haste, for Carlo read it as an ante-dated justificatory document to some mischievous design, and he desired that hands as sure as his own, and yet more vigilant eyes, should keep watch over his betrothed.
