A Use of Riches

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “I wouldn’t doubt that for a moment.” Craine, who was rather startled by this sudden gleam of grim humour, spoke with unforced conviction. Colloquially, he would have expressed his feelings by saying that the Marchesa now struck him as a thoroughly spine-chilling old girl. At the same time he had a sense that she was really making unnecessarily heavy weather of it all. And perhaps there was a way of dropping to a less dramatic tone. “But what about Nino himself?” he asked. “I’d say he deserves consulting. Has he any notions on what should be done with him?”

  There was a moment’s silence- – or near silence, since the Marchesa was distinctly to be heard in it as taking a deep breath. “Nino,” she said, “doesn’t say much. In fact he doesn’t often say anything.”

  “I see.” This was in fact on Craine’s part a doubtful claim. Anything he saw was by way of distressing conjecture, and proceeded more from the Marchesa’s tone than from her words. He had suddenly glimpsed the possibility that the child was in some way not normal. It seemed, as he turned it over rapidly in his mind, only too likely, for it would explain the old lady’s overwrought manner of dealing with her problem. There would be something a little stiff, after all, in confronting Jill with the fact that her first husband had fathered, say, an idiot boy. But at least Craine wasn’t disposed to linger in a doubt like this. “Hadn’t I better meet him?” he asked briskly. “After all, as far as I’m concerned, we’re discussing an unknown quantity till then.”

  The Marchesa bowed – at the same time looking at him with an intensification of the sort of regard by which he had already been a good deal perplexed. It was as if he were something preserved in a bottle. Then she turned and, with a motion to follow her, left the room.

  They climbed. They climbed – as it seemed to him – in a way the old lady oughtn’t to venture on. Driving up to the villa, he hadn’t been struck by it as notably lofty. But this, he now realised, was because it was on a large scale throughout. Taken on the flat, it would certainly be a place to get thoroughly lost in; you could have whole suites, rather than mere cupboards, for your family skeletons. Perpendicularly, it just couldn’t be negotiated without a prodigal expenditure of breath. First they climbed a staircase that was broad and imposing – and moreover thickly carpeted in a fashion suggesting that some late-nineteenth-century Forni had been disposed to unworthy concessions to the bourgeois spirit of his era.

  Up this, nevertheless, they moved in single file, for it was somehow unmistakably the Marchesa’s sense that he should keep a tread or two behind. And presently there was no alternative. The place, so to speak, got into its stride. The staircase took a slant, or twist, into the mediaeval mode, and spiralled upwards through solid masonry. Every full turn there was a narrow window, through which Craine glimpsed a landscape which, thus viewed, appeared to lie under an intolerable blaze of light. He hadn’t anywhere earlier noticed in it – it occurred to him – that sort of ruined fortification which often, near a great Italian house, represents the original castelletto in which the family began. Perhaps the Forni had adopted another plan, and simply surrounded an ancient structure of the sort with what struck them as adequate in the way of Renaissance expansiveness.

  It was at least clear that the Marchesa had conducted him to the oldest part of the place, and that the young Nino was accommodated in what might fairly be called an aerie. Perhaps it was assured that he had a sound heart, and desired that he should develop his leg muscles and his lungs. Otherwise, it seemed to be rather an out-of-the-way – and even a slightly grim – place in which to keep a small boy. At Pinn, it was true, Tim and Charles lurked under the stone slabs of the roof. But their quarters couldn’t be called remote; when their trains were going, or they had a row, you could hear them all over the house.

  The Marchesa had stopped at last. She opened a door and made, without looking at him, one of her small commanding motions. He obeyed, and walked through the door before her.

  He was in a turret chamber. It was circular, with a conical roof into which a large skylight had been inset; there was a stove opposite the door; and midway between these, on either side, a modern window. It was a pleasant room, comfortably if sparely furnished in an undistinguished modern way. Apart from its basic shape, there was nothing striking about it except its single occupant.

  Near one of the windows a man sat at a bench, weaving a basket. For a moment, after the door opened, he had continued his work, as if there was some small manipulation he wished to complete. Then he turned to face his visitors, and as he did so his hands fell idly on his knees. Craine took a long look, and realised that this was John Arnander. He took another look, and saw that Arnander was blind.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was afterwards Craine’s impression that, during the first moments of facing his strange disaster, mere intelligence had made all the running. Marchesa Forni’s cable repeated itself in his head, and he realised the grotesque misconception that her wretched English had started. It was not a child’s age that she had set down, for there was no child. It was the length of a man’s sojourn in her house. And Nino was good enough Italian for any John – the more so if the person named was of the standing of some rather humble domestic familiar. Perhaps with a very good reason for having himself taken for dead, Arnander had presented himself to the late eccentric Marchese, and had been received – they were the old lady’s words – as an act of charity and asylum. This might be wrong in detail, but it clearly gave the outline of the present formidable situation.

  And Craine realised too – with a sharpness that would have penetrated to something funny in it, had not the whole revelation been so little that – the extravagant cross-purposes at which the Marchesa and he had lately been talking. He had himself come to Castelarbia, it must appear to her, prepared to do something about the husband of the woman with whom he lived – and he had spoken blandly of sorting matters out. He had even airily told this oppressively Catholic lady that in regard to religious issues there was nothing that couldn’t be managed. It was true that the Marchesa’s own conduct rose up before him as being – at least in default of much explanation – absolutely monstrous. But he himself, by jumping to conclusions, had accepted the part of a fool. He disliked appearing a fool, and his mind took a second’s breathing space to acknowledge this before addressing itself to the substance of his and Jill’s – and John Arnander’s – plight.

  For Arnander too had his plight, his disaster, his claim. This, objectively regarded, was obvious. But – again when he came to look back on those first definitive moments – Craine was to be surprised at the absoluteness with which the fact established itself in his own mind. It was true that Arnander, unless he were not blind merely but demented as well, had everything to answer for. His conduct, when probed, would almost certainly illustrate Jill’s assertion that he was a thoroughly unsatisfactory person. Nevertheless he was John Arnander, with that one of his senses gone in which all his riches had consisted; was John Arnander, forgotten, weaving baskets in an attic in a back-of-beyond of Tuscany.

  It was all in Craine’s head as he stood in his moment of revelation, as yet hardly advanced into the room. And – although so much was already in fact decided for him – he believed for a further moment that he simply didn’t know what to do. He might have been a child on the brink of a party, wondering. And then he walked forward. “I suppose even Englishmen sometimes shake hands,” he said.

  Arnander didn’t speak. His right hand, idle on his knee, seemed inert and dead. Craine found himself watching it with intense anxiety. And then the hand stirred.

  Perhaps Arnander hadn’t a notion of who had been brought into the room. Nevertheless Craine had a small, secure sense of triumph, mingled with desolation, as their hands touched.

  But it was virtually as far as they got. The man existed, it seemed to Craine, in some deeply introverted state, and one couldn’t tell whether it reconciled itself with sanity. He wasn’t hostile. Once or twice he smiled. And the smile was transforming, a
s it must always have been. It even lighted up his eyes. And they were eyes which – strangely – were already striking; were the only striking aspect of his features. His blindness seemed to be one of the disconcerting sorts that scarcely appear. And now when he smiled his eyes were beautiful, and all his features redeemed themselves momentarily from meagreness and meanness. In repose he gave the impression of one who has prematurely aged and shrunk. Yet even if he hadn’t a presence he had – all the time – an identity. He was the man whose self-portrait, body and soul, Craine had seen in Weidle’s room only a few days before.

  It didn’t seem an occasion for evasive chat, or yet quite for an orderly entry upon the situation in its aspect as a problem to be solved. As if he were making a customary periodical report, Craine tried telling Arnander about his sons. And the man knew he had sons. That much became clear. But it emerged only from muttered responses to what, on the subject, Craine could cast into the form of questions. And the mutterings, he felt, were the product not of curiosity but of courtesy. Courtesy lingered – a sort of forlorn unreliable handle – in Arnander: partly the native courtesy of a man who owns somewhere some very large domain, partly the wary courtesy of a man who has picked up manners rather late. It wasn’t, Craine felt, worth twopence, either way. And there was something disagreeable in trying, so to speak, to sell Tim and Charles to their father. They were a damned sight too good to need selling . . . Craine was surprised when, just for a moment, this feeling in himself was shot through by another. It happened – again just for a moment – that he seemed to catch Arnander’s interest with something he recounted of Charles: the boy’s absorbed contemplation of clouds. And instantly Craine distinguished in himself something which, although sharp enough, he had to grope to identify. When he did so, the thing didn’t look pretty, for it was jealousy. He accepted it, soberly, as a first small mark set on an uncharted future.

  And presently it had to be over – this interview with a husk of genius. It had to be over without what, from Arnander, could fairly be called intelligible speech. His mind had simply drifted away – as his hands had strayed back to his basket – and the Marchesa had made a sign that Craine should follow her from the room. He obeyed, but not before he had gained one further, and almost shockingly poignant, impression. Directly under the skylight, so that he had to pass it as he moved to the door, there was a table with a litter of papers. And these were scrawled over with arabesques in thick black lead. He wondered whether the medium meant that Arnander could still just dimly see – or whether he continued in total blindness an exercise formerly remaining feasible at an earlier stage of whatever disease his eyes had suffered. Anyway, it was some of these papers – call them drawings or documents – that had, heaven knew how, come Fyodor Weidle’s way. And Craine understood why Weidle had murmured something about having the paper examined. It had appeared to his skilled eye not as old as it ought to be. There was glimmering in Weidle’s mind the notion that he had come into the possession of – so to speak – posthumous drawings. It was a minor – it didn’t seem to Craine at all an important – queerness in the situation.

  They descended from the turret in silence. But at the head of the broader staircase the Marchesa paused. “If you will be so kind,” she said; and he realised that she proposed to take his arm. Certainly she looked done up. But he understood that he was favoured, that his monstrosity had in some way been mitigated for her as a consequence of the interview just concluded. And he found that he wasn’t led back to the office in which, no doubt, she was accustomed to discharge the business of the fattore and the tenants. They went into a small high room of more hospitable suggestion, hung with faded silk and containing a little French furniture hinting the possibility of at least moderate relaxation. There was a modern oil portrait which Craine for a moment supposed to be that of the late crazed Marchese, but which he then saw to be of the present head of the House of Savoy; on a table in the window there was a signed photograph of the Pope; opposite this a half-open door gave a glimpse of an oratory. He had been abruptly promoted to the most private part of the house.

  The Marchesa made the familiar small motion with her hand and sat down. “I am afraid,” she said, “that I have received you under the influence of a mistaken impression. I am very much afraid that this has been a shock to you; that your—your wife told you nothing, until my cable made it necessary to do so.” She paused and looked full at Craine. He was never to know what his expression had been in that moment. But whatever it was, it brought her instant comprehension. “No,” she went on quietly. “That too is wrong. Your wife has not known either. This is terrible.”

  He said nothing for a moment. He hadn’t sat down, and now he walked to the window and looked out over the terrace to the distant chestnut woods. The old lady might judge this an improper lack of formality, but it was his instinct to try for something easy between them. Even with people rather remote from her, and whose habits and assumptions could do no more than glimmer on her horizon, she must be called quick on the uptake. “Jill – my wife – certainly didn’t know,” he said as he turned back to face her. “And the discovery has been, for me, more abrupt even than you now realise. It was kind of you to cable in English, but it set us oddly on the wrong track. When I entered that room a few minutes ago, Marchesa, I didn’t expect to find a man. I expected to find a small boy. And our first conversation – which seemed so strange to you – was conducted by me on that false assumption.”

  What the Marchesa would have found by way of reply to this never appeared, for the door opened to admit a small procession of servants. The first was carrying a silver lamp with a flickering yellow flame, and it was an index of Craine’s disturbed condition that for a second he supposed that something of a religious character was about to transact itself in the adjoining oratory. But presently he found himself drinking tea – and separated from his hostess by an expanse of silver and china that stood in a rather striking disproportion to the actual quantity of refreshment provided. He caught himself reflecting that, although you can’t dine like a prince in Arezzo, there is a catacomb-like restaurant where you may fare quite well and appropriately on fungi. In a few hours’ time he and Jill would sit down there. Indisputably, it couldn’t be tête à tête. There would now be a ghostly third – and one whom the two of them had rather inadequately entertained in the past. It was true, for instance, that he didn’t feel himself at all fully to know what sort of marriage Jill’s first marriage – her legal marriage, as presumably for the present it must be called – had been. Of course he knew its factual, and even its overtly emotional, outlines. He knew what Jill supposed to be her own judgment on it when she had closed the door and applied the seal. But even when Arnander had appeared to cease to be, the marriage hadn’t ceased to be. Behind the door there must have remained a large shadowed chamber of which some of the dimensions might still be unknown to Jill as well as to her second husband. And it had to be opened up again now – to be opened up that evening over fungi and acid Tuscan wine.

  “He lied.” These were the Marchesa’s first words when her major-domo had securely withdrawn.

  “I suppose he did.” Craine paused. “Unless,” he allowed himself to add, “you and your husband took rather a casual view of its mattering – the difference, I mean, between a woman’s husband being alive and dead.”

  “I spoke earlier of an assurance.” The Marchesa’s tone was sharp for a moment. “I required it, and it was given. Nino told us, in some detail, how he had managed to let his wife know what he proposed.”

  “To let her know that he was disappearing and allowing himself to be supposed dead?”

  The Marchesa inclined her head.

  “No doubt he had his reasons – of which perhaps you’ll be able to inform me now. And they may well have been cogent, from his point of view. But didn’t the immorality of the thing strike you at all?”

  The Marchesa accepted this as a permissible question – and indeed Craine felt that she was schoo
ling herself to accept quite a lot. “He assured us,” she said, “of word having come back that his wife concurred in the plan. He said that she was rich and attractive and would console herself.”

  “I see.” What Craine was literally seeing as he said this happened to be the photograph of the Pope; and it occurred to him that he must make as much allowance for the Marchesa’s alien climate as she must make for his. “And her consolations might include bigamous marriage and illegitimate children?”

  “Children? But, yes – I know you have children. And I scarcely know what to say, Mr. Craine. You must understand our situation. We weren’t dealing with a believer. We were dealing with a pagan – a persuasive and charming and desperate pagan. And my husband believed him to have genius.”

  “So he has. It was one particular, at least, in which you were right, Marchesa.”

  “That may be so. But it was my husband’s conviction, not mine. I have little knowledge of painting. Of—of his wife we naturally knew less, although I had met her. Nino assured us that her views were similar to his own. The arrangement would only be a kind of divorce – as divorce is conceived of in Protestant societies. Not indeed a legal divorce. But I have remarked before that we are not much concerned about policemen. Even if Nino’s wife contracted another seeming marriage, in the full knowledge that Nino was alive, it would be no affair of ours. In our hearts we should disapprove – but only as we should disapprove of some savage ritual in a jungle. It would be her own responsibility.”

  There was a short silence. Craine had again caught the Pope’s eye, and it occurred to him that it was a pity the Forni had not consulted him. He suspected that his Holiness would have rather briskly corrected their moral theology. However, that was neither here nor there. “But last week,” he said, “you felt constrained to summon the savages from their jungle? Well, here I am.”