The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  The third he also recognized from another moonlit evening in the Piazza del Granduca, where the light poured into the square from behind the old palace and sheathed Neptune’s back in silver; it looked as if the colossal old god were uprearing to life again and about to stride back toward the sea. It was this third study that caught his admiration, perhaps as much for the idea of the thing as for the execution. So it was my Neptune I started on the following morning in my painting room.

  Our single interruption before the arrival of Gibbon and Mrs. Spooner was the great flood of early November, not long after we had returned to the city. Mr. Greenough’s studio, on the slope of the Fieosle hills, was safe. The Greenoughs being away in Austrian Silesia taking das Wasser kur, even unto Mrs. G.’s confinement, we and Charles Skottowe, the Irish artist, removed a number of paintings to that higher ground for safekeeping until the waters receded. There too I hid away my rather too Dionysian portrait of my mentor. Fortunately, our quarters on the third floor of our pension remained untouched. Otherwise, our lives and labors continued in uninterrupted passion and serenity we knew could not last much longer.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The rival

  As soon as Mrs. Spooner and Gibbon arrived we left the city for new quarters in Bellosguardo. I don’t know whether Mrs. Spooner suspected anything, but it is hard to believe that despite our displays of innocence and respectability, she did not divine something amiss. She maintained her generosity nevertheless, only increasing my secret tortures of guilt from our betrayals. I did not know just what Mr. Spooner felt, for we avoided one another’s company with a scrupulousness that, looking back on it, probably called attention to itself. I began to spend time haunting the galleries alone or showing Gibbon some of my discoveries in them.

  To his credit, Mr. Spooner began a loving portrait of his wife, lavishing as much attention on this portrait as ever I had seen him lavish on any other. One afternoon, early in that summer of 1845, I entered his studio expecting to find him alone at that hour, only to discover that he and his wife were in the midst of her third sitting. He was calm and cordial, as if nothing had altered between us since leaving Boston; he invited me to have a seat and enjoy some “gossip of New England.”

  I saw again that she was indeed in her matronly way a rather pretty woman. His portrait was beginning to capture also, beyond her pleasant aspect, a deeper character and vivacity, which all those who knew her intimately would have recognized. This deeper character, which I believe men found appealing, arose as if out of her true nature from beneath the mild physiognomy she turned to the world.

  After their conversation modulated from Boston to her cautious journey across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, I said, “You do look not only fully recovered, Mrs. Spooner, but more fit than ever.”

  “The sea voyage was perfectly bearable,” she said. “And thank you, Allegra. Yes, I feel quite well now.”

  “Your waiting for the mildest season was wise, then,” I suggested.

  “I believed it helped me, and especially during two perfectly dull weeks spent in quarantine at Gibraltar.”

  “Many come more indirectly for that very reason, I understand.”

  “Perhaps so, but I was in no mood for overland journeys,” she said and smiled. “You look well yourself, Allegra. But I was just telling George—Italy has changed you in some fashion. I haven’t quite made up my mind yet just how. Maybe it’s something to do with all this independence and freedom to study and work here … and I’m sure the beauty as well.” She waved her arm in a wide arc to take in the countryside beyond our villa rooms.

  “Allegra’s work improves steadily,” Mr. Spooner said. He smiled at me, turning his face from his easel a moment. “We must go to her painting room later, my dear, so you may see for yourself.”

  “I’d be delighted,” she said pleasantly. “I haven’t seen enough of you lately, Allegra, and even less of your paintings, since arriving here. I hope you haven’t found our arrival a distraction or … a nuisance.”

  “Heavens no, Mrs. Spooner.” I laughed. “How can you say such a thing?”

  “These days I see little enough of you myself, Allegra,” Mr. Spooner said. He looked at his wife. “She’s become a regular anchorite in the service of her Angels of Inspiration. But seriously, Emeline, she is becoming a wonder fit for the praise she’s been receiving from home.”

  “I work hard, but I also take fresh air and walk and visit the galleries frequently. I’m glad Gibbon has come too, for he makes a good walking companion. Do you know the Florentines do not know quite how to take a foreign woman walking in the city on her own? They all ride in carriages themselves. And there is this one impertinent little man in particular who not only makes little noises and hisses like the others, but comes right up to you.”

  “He has a mania for running after such unattended ladies,” Mr. Spooner said and laughed. “And he is violently amused if the unsuspecting damsel jumps aside at his zealous tributes to her attractions. But he is restrained somewhat by his vocabulary, which he limits to a few repetitive but flattering ejaculations.”

  “‘Very good,’” I said, imitating his voice. “‘Very much pretty! I like… . You handsome!’ And so on, as he dodges from side to side, just heading you, then sailing round, and cutting ridiculous capers at every turn.”

  “He was so enthusiastic in his pursuit of one lady,” Mr. Spooner said, “that he pitched himself over a donkey as she turned into her own door!”

  “What an infernal annoyance,” she said, smiling. “I trust we older dames are safe from his admiration, however.”

  “Don’t be too sure, my dear,” Mr. Spooner said. “I’m sure he’d love to count you among his harem. Give his right arm for the pleasure, no doubt.”

  “He’ll pop up right under your eyes like a phantom!” I said. “Count on it if you go about in the streets of the old city alone.”

  “Nothing short of a thorough drubbing will ever stop the imbecile,” Mr. Spooner said. “But no need of your going about alone now, is there, Emeline.”

  “Or go in a carriage,” I added. “The difference in prices between Paris and Florence enables anyone who wishes to keep a carriage in Tuscany.”

  We continued exchanging stories of Florentine excesses until the day’s sitting terminated.

  That evening, Mr. and Mrs. Spooner came into my painting room to consider some of my productions at their leisure. They were mostly pleased, and said so. Mrs. Spooner lingered after her husband excused himself.

  “Are you sure you are well?” she finally asked, turning from an oil painting.

  “Yes. Quite, Mrs. Spooner. Do I appear otherwise?”

  “Only in some vague way, my dear. Am I mistaken to perceive some slight dissatisfaction, or disappointment? May I be of help in any way?”

  “I have perhaps been working too hard and worrying more than I should about sustaining my commissions—after these are finished. I seem to mistrust good fortune. You see, I do well enough—my debt’s paid off and I’m getting by in modest circumstances now. I am, all in all, perhaps too much the worrier. Please don’t trouble yourself over my nonsense. Things have in fact gone well enough in Italy. Getting my living, I mean.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said and smiled. “But remember; I am here if you need any assistance. George and I are here. You’ll not go wanting. Think of your work and let nothing else trouble your mind. The rest will come of its natural course. And now you have Gibbon to escort you about. Young people need other young people.”

  “You are right, of course.”

  “Don’t hesitate to ask … to ask anything of me. Don’t let worries fester like old wounds.”

  Her sympathy and generosity only made me feel more ashamed of my past betrayals. But what could I do? Live with them, with myself. And work. The time would come, I now saw, when I would no longer be able to remain with them. I did not know how long I could endure this necessary distance from George Spooner.

  TH
EN ABOUT THAT TIME I found myself distracted into the company of a young Englishman who flung his handsome, punctilious, and cantankerous presence into the City of Flowers at the end of May, another young man whose influence upon me I now believe to have been considerable—much as I found myself disagreeing with his sundry pronunciamentos at the time. One afternoon in a gallery of the Pitti I was rapidly sketching, on an empty stomach, certain portions of the celebrated Salvator marines when he swept by me in a conspicuous blue cravat that matched his eyes. He returned to stand and glance unobtrusively at my scratchings. He pretended to be absorbed mainly with that master’s battle pieces, standing by and away from them at different angles, coming near as if to compare the marine before which I sat. He seemed to become so agitated, however, as he stepped about that I finally asked whether he were feeling quite well or whether the heat outside had brought on some illness that required the aid of others. No longer able to contain himself, he then suggested, with an audacity I soon learned to expect, that we would all do far better to study the frescoes of Angelico at St. Mark’s or Santa Maria Novella.

  “This, Madam,” he said, pointing with his cane to a magnificent Salvator battle piece, “is fit for nothing but a sign over a butcher’s shop!”

  I carefully closed my sketchbook and asked him to explain himself. He looked at me as if to study such a strange creature—this Sketching-Woman-With-Her-Own-Opinions—but his face seemed, even while he remained silent, to relent. He then explained briefly that he had just come from a morning devoted to the study of certain Fra Angelicoes, had been overwhelmed by his effort and excitement over the heavenly faces before him, and could not have “come from a more unfortunate school for Salvator,” who by the sudden comparison seemed “a mindless charlatan and ruffian.” He had trouble with his r’s, pronouncing them, rather comically I thought, like w’s, as in “Salvatow” or “Wuffian.”

  As we explored and debated these and other opinions which he boldly delivered, he managed also to introduce himself as the author of Modern Painters, of which I had heard only certain vague murmurings among the cognoscenti-in-exile. This abrasive young man mentioned that he was traveling in Italy to complete his second volume, and was specifically in Florence to visit the Uffizi, Pitti, and Accademia galleries and, even better, to prosecute his studies in the chapels and cloisters of Novella, Marco, Croce, and the Carmine. Later, over tea, he also delivered himself of strong opinions regarding the Tuscan and Florentine populace, whom he portrayed as disquieted souls lost in the Purgatory of Philistia.

  “Except when I am in the churches,” he said (like the very monk he at bottom no doubt was), “I don’t like Florence. There is no feeling about it: the people are Leghorn bonnet makers and one feels always in a shop—too busy about nothings to admit emotion of any kind. And the countryside is covered with villas of broken English and dissipated Italians. And the city streets, without footways, are so horribly crowded one thinks of nothing but dodging carriages.”

  After days spent in his studies, he often, I soon found, overstated his case to vent the exasperations of his work and to add an element of cynical humor into our conversations.

  “The square is full of listless, chattering, smoking vagabonds,” he said on another occasion, “and they are forever paving, repairing, gaslighting, and drumming from morning till night, like the crass men of our century that they truly are. Have you not, Mrs. Fullerton, quite given up stopping to look about you in the very thoroughfares for all this noise, dust, tobacco smoke, and spitting?”

  “No, sir,” I would reply to such like remarks. “I find that I am reminded by it all the more of home.”

  “I also, and all the worse for that!” One time he claimed to have seen no pretty faces among the Florentine women, and no vestiges of the deep old faces among the men—“only these French beards and staring eyes and mouths with cigars sticking out at you.”

  He appeared to delight in mild squabbles with his interlocutors over such trivial matters, and he was sure to produce a laugh or two through the wit of his headlong criticisms, but on one point I found myself rather in agreement—viz., the Florentines’ tendency to undervalue and thereby at times deface the magnificence all about them. We produced a rather lengthy catalogue one evening, putting our heads together, of examples we had seen: the perpetual chipping and cleaning and adding to Giotto’s campanile; the exposure of paintings to weather and workmen; the infernal retouching and “brightening” of the masters; and the priests’ hanging of their candles and lamps from the old frescoes themselves, as I had seen they had nailed two big lamps right into a Masaccio.

  “Even though today’s Grand Duke wishes to encourage art,” he added, “he doesn’t know what art is or how to encourage it. So that the monkey who touched up Buffalmacco’s pictures by painting everything green begins to look like a gentleman and a scholar compared to these modern Florentines, who are surely a separate race from the old masters and the crowds of the mighty dead who people their paintings. I tell you, Mrs. Fullerton, it shakes one’s English prejudices!”

  Yet I confess, for all his satire and dandyism, this young Englishman began to unsettle some of my own opinions and judgments. There seemed about him as much to admire as to revile, but his discipline was his crowning attribute—everything in his life was subordinated to his current project. I was reminded by this attribute of Mr. Spooner, but he, on the other hand, always maintained an engaging quality of generosity about him.

  ALSO THAT SUMMER a girl of fifteen (the daughter of a rather dissolute English baronet and his stunning wife) came among us with her otherworldly gifts. We met this young woman, Adèle, through Mrs. Powers, an honest but credulous woman, whose Thursday evenings were sometimes given to spiritualistic displays. Whether it was for some girlish quality in herself or for her highly sensitive, visionary nature, Adèle was the only young woman whom Mr. Ruskin seemed to notice. She possessed among her powers those of a medium, and her presence among gatherings of poets, artists, and aimless aristocrats became the very thing.

  Thin and wan, the poor creature did appear not long for this world, yet she was in her own way pretty and exceptionally clever. Her performances on the pianoforte or in dramatic readings, simultaneously translated from Latin or Italian texts, were in as much demand as her performances at a seance. There seemed to be general agreement that her powers of manifestation eclipsed those of many others in the city at that time who claimed such gifts.

  It was at one of Mrs. Powers’s evenings that the Spooners and I met this young lady. I found the rappings and movements of “personages” and things about the room disturbing, but remained skeptical. Later, Mrs. Powers assured me of the authenticity of these strange doings, and said that she herself had once been molested by a spectral monk in her very drawing room. She then suggested that we take the opportunity of Adèle’s visit to Florence to see whether we might get to the bottom of certain nighttime disturbances up in our old villa. We agreed to her proposal all in good fun. Mr. Spooner himself had once charged nighttime bumpings to the “vigorous dalliance of our most unrespectable house mates,” John and Louise. These friends no longer lived with us in our new villa, yet here too certain sounds emanated from the night.

  At all events, Mr. Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. Powers, the baronet and his wife, and, of course, Adèle herself, joined the Spooners, John, Louise, and me in Bellosguardo one evening during the fullness of the moon. After a light supper and a walk about the gardens in the fine evening air, we went into my studio, for the quality of the moonlight flooding in at the window, and sat about a round table arranged for our purpose.

  Seated comfortably at the table and at an equal distance from one another, Mrs. Powers announced sweetly, “Come in please, Adèle.”

  Adèle opened the door and walked in like a cloud floating before the moon. She had changed into a sort of white muslin nightgown, girdled Empire-fashion by a silver cord. Mr. Ruskin, seated beside me, seemed to tremble at the sight of her. As the girl seated herself in
the single empty chair, Mrs. Powers asked that we all remain silent and still, no matter what we witnessed.

  Almost immediately Adèle shuddered; then a tremor snaked continuously through the length of her thin body for some minutes. Her eyes were closed, though the eyelids quavered as she fell deeper into her trance. My own skin and hair prickled as I observed her, and I soon felt an almost sickening apprehension when her movement and breathing began to resemble those of a woman, or in this case a child, in birth-labor. Leaning far forward now, Adèle rested her small hands on the table, and they seemed to tremble in the same rhythm as her eyelids and lips. All this I could see well enough by the moonlight pouring in and by the dim glow of a single green-shaded oil lamp in the far corner of our room.

  When Adèle’s thin body started to jerk in her chair, my apprehension turned to honest fear, and I suddenly regretted our foolish willingness to engage in such mystic experiments. Where I had anticipated knockings, rappings, and the ventriloquisms or other mountebankeries of an amusing seance, I heard against the silence only the laboring of the child’s body.

  Soon we felt a stream of cool air, as if emanating from Adèle. I then began to wonder if I had lived as a heretic all my years only to admit at last to intercessions from supernal realms. Perhaps I was about to face the true author of those deep-night knockings and shufflings, of which we sometimes spoke with a complacent curiosity in the brightness of morning.

  “There is someone here?” Mrs. Powers calmly asked. “With us now, Adèle?”

  The child jerked her head in the affirmative, taking in quick full breaths of air.

  But nothing happened. Only the terrific laboring continued in the twilight of moon and oil lamp. And so things remained for perhaps another quarter of an hour, whereupon Adèle then grew all calm and raised her arms off the table, palms upward, her eyelids alone trembling still, as if in fitful sleep. And she began to speak softly, in her own voice rather than some other. At first we could not discern her words, but gradually I recognized my name. To my astonishment, some personage, Adèle said, was reaching toward me—some man of energy and restlessness; she knew not whom.