Enchanter's Nightshade

by Ann Bridge

  The girl was too shaken and too inexperienced in such things to attempt any protest, when at last he let her go. “I must go,” she said tremulously, getting up. “The Marchesa may be waiting.”

  “Yes, you must go, cara,” Count Roffredo said, springing up too. “Along there—it is shorter. I shall go straight to the car—I have made my adieux. But I shall see you again— soon!” He turned down another path and was gone.

  Almina walked quickly back towards the house. In the heaving confusion of her feelings one thought alone stood out clearly—the fear of being late. And where was Marietta? To her great relief, on one of the terraces she came on her pupil, seated on the parapet propped against an urn, one long black leg dangling, gazing out at the mountains—it was obvious that she was making, and had made, not the smallest effort to rejoin her instructress.

  “There you are! I thought you were going to follow us,” Almina said.

  The child looked tranquilly at her.

  “I did come up, quite soon,” she replied, “but I saw your dress through the trees along there, and I thought Roffredo was probably going to take you for a regular walk, so I stayed here. You’re not cross, are you?” she said, slipping off the wall and tucking her arm through that of her governess. “Roffredo is always amusing, and you see me so much. Where is he?”

  “He has gone to his car. But we had better hurry in— your Mother may be waiting,” Almina said.

  “She will not be. They have plenty to talk about,” Marietta said easily. To Almina’s relief the child did not appear to notice her failure to take up the question of whether she were cross or not. It would have been a difficult one to answer—she did not herself yet know, in her turmoil of emotions, whether she was glad or sorry that this had happened. She must think it all out later. But on the long drive home she did not really think at all—she sat silent and dreamy on the swaying small seat of the victoria, looking back at that tree-strewn slope below the red wing at Castellone, when now and then a turn of the road brought it into view, as at some strange outpost of a magic realm, a place that did not belong in the real world at all. The horses’ hoofs beat out a slow rhythm in her head as she sat, jigging through the golden afternoon countryside, while their white hairs again settled, unnoticed, on her green silk dress.

  But the day’s emotions were not yet over for Almina. They got in late, and found Giulio hanging about, rather cross —he had brought over an essay to be corrected by Miss Prestwich, and now there was not time. His Aunt charitably suggested his staying to dine, if Miss Prestwich did not mind dealing with the essay afterwards; Count Carlo was also coming over to the six o’clock dinner, and they could drive back together. It was still hot in the school-room when Miss Prestwich and her second pupil repaired there after coffee, and Giulio suggested an adjournment to somewhere out of doors. Almina, tired and with a headache, was glad to agree. The terrace was still occupied by the family party, so they went and sat in thetorrino, and Almina tried to listen carefully to Giulio’s odd English constructions; but all the time, across his words, her mind heard others, and how different! “Ah cara, you are so lovely,” and “I wonder if you have any idea how beautiful you are.” The essay corrected, they sat on for a little while in the summer-house—it was cool there, and quiet, and Giulio was a silent and unexacting companion. At last however he broke the silence.

  “The day you came, Marietta and I sat and watched for you here,” he said. “Did she tell you?”

  “No.”

  “We were so anxious for you to come, to teach us both,” he pursued. “We talked about what you would be like. Of course we expected you to be just like Gela, only more learned. And when I saw you, just at first, I was horrified! You were so young. I thought—‘How can she teach anyone anything?’ Did you see how aghast I was?”

  Almina laughed. “No, I was too flustered, I think—it was all so new.”

  He looked at her, gravely now. “The reality is no longer a disappointment,” he said, earnestly.

  Almina said, with equal gravity, that she was glad. Oh, that was what was so wonderful about her, the young man thought, watching her quiet face—her seriousness, her simplicity. So young, so lovely—but she could sit with a man in an arbour, on a summer’s evening, without any smiling or beguiling or airs or tricks; without consciousness. For all her youth and beauty she was like Gela, after all—learned and grave and good; the only sort of woman with whom one could be at peace, with whom one’s heart could find a home. A feeling that was close to adoration stirred in him as he watched her sitting there, so unconscious and quiet—adoration and yet comfort. “I am so glad you came,” he said suddenly.

  “So am I,” Almina said, smiling happily back at him. But she was thinking, as she spoke, of the smell of the privet and the pines, over at Castellone that afternoon.

  On their way back to the house they took the longer path, which dropped down through olives and cypresses to join the one which led along the ridge towards Odredo. As they descended, they saw Count Carlo and the Marchesa Suzy strolling leisurely along this path, talking; they were too far off for their words to be audible, but their gestures made a sort of diagram of their conversation—of a request or affirmation on his side, an amused negation on hers. Something about the intimacy of the whole picture struck sharply on Miss Prestwich’s consciousness; it gave her a slight shock. Then, as the two figures moved slowly out of sight behind a group of arbutus, she pushed the thought from her. Italians were always so expansive in their manner—she must not start imagining things.

  Giulio however had no such scruples. Coming on top of his meditations about Miss Prestwich, the picture presented by his Father had struck him, too, with unusual force.

  “How I dislike my Aunt!” he exclaimed abruptly.

  “You should not do that,” Almina said, as in duty bound.

  “But I do! It is not only that—I disapprove of her,” he said vigorously. “She has always been the same—the Enchantress !—she must have a man dangling after her! At her age, it is ridiculous. She makes a perfect fool of my Father. And now it is Roffredo she is after—so Elena says. Certainly it would not surprise me! She was flirting with him enough the other day. It—it is unseemly!” he said, striking his essay angrily against the trunk of an olive-tree as he passed it.

  This was more than Almina could let pass. “Count Giulio, I cannot allow you to say these things in my hearing.” she said, with a firmness that he had never seen her use before. “That is unseemly, if you like. The Marchesa is my employer, and I live in her house—I cannot have her so spoken of.”

  “That is just what I hate,” the young man muttered furiously. “You, of all people! I cannot—” he subsided, obviously struggling to regain his self-control.

  “All this is very foolish—you exaggerate,” Almina said, with a coldness that she did not quite feel; “Elena is very reckless in what she says, and she does not mean half of it. You should not pay any attention to her.” She was starded and puzzled by Giulio’s outburst, and felt that she must rebuke him for it; but she had come to have a warm, almost a motherly feeling for him—his enthusiasm, his difficulties, his eager desire to learn; the same sort of sympathetic affection that was growing in her for Marietta. They both needed so much help, from someone—help which she was happy to feel that she was beginning to give. But they both had this extraordinary recklessness and openness of speech and thought about their elders, which must be checked. Well, she had checked it now—Giulio walked silent and submissive beside her on their way back to the house. But before she slept that night Miss Prestwich found herself thinking a good deal about his words. Coming on top of her own shock at the sight of the Count and the Marchesa, they made a very uncomfortable impression, which she could not wholly brush aside. She remembered how she too had noticed the Marchesa’s manner with Count Roffredo the evening after their walk to the bird-catcher’s house. Ah, but as far as Roffredo was concerned, it was not true; she knew better! She fell asleep with a smile on he
r lips.

  Chapter Ten

  Giulio drove back to Odredo with his Father that night in a very angry and dissatisfied frame of mind. Miss Prestwich’s firmness had silenced his words, but it was very far from having suppressed his feelings. Indeed it had increased them. She was blind, because her eyes were too pure to see; she was loyal, because that was her nature—so stoutly loyal to a person so unworthy of her loyalty! He felt that he could hardly bear it. He glanced now and then with aversion at the silhouette of the Count’s head and beard, as he sat beside him, profiled against the warm starlight— smoking a cigar, humming an air, with every appearance of a man very well pleased with himself; and when his Father asked him some kindly question about his progress with his English lessons, he actually swallowed before replying, as though it required a physical effort to overcome his distaste.

  The fact was that the first result of Giulio’s feeling for Miss Prestwich, which had been growing steadily during the last weeks, had been to focus his attention on his Aunt Suzy much more closely than ever before. This often happens— the intensity with which one sees one person suddenly opens one’s eyes to others. For years Giulio, disliking his Aunt, had both avoided her and avoided, as it were, looking at her; since Miss Prestwich’s arrival he had been constantly at Vill’ Alta, for one thing, and for another had begun to study the young Marchesa with eyes made critical by having a standard of contrast close at hand. And in this new clear-sightedness he had become aware of her flirtation with his Father. So far, he thought it no more than that; but even that was sufficient to startle and disgust him. And this feeling, vague at first, had been crystallised sharply this evening by that sight of them together, when he was walking with Almina. He was horrified that she should see it too—it seemed a revolting form of insult to her; and his irritated disapproval had been turned, by this slight episode, against his Father as well as his Aunt.

  Now Giulio was filial enough to be distressed by this. Like both Elena and Marietta, and indeed most of the poor man’s immediate relations, Giulio had hitherto slightly, but on the whole tolerantly, despised his parent; they did not understand one another in the least, and the boy was often fretted by his Father’s obtuseness about his own plans, but there had always been a measure of affection between them. Nothing like this acrid anger and disgust had ever moved him before, and it made him very uncomfortable. He spent a wretched night. Waking, next morning, in his sun-filled room at Odredo, overlooking the wide courtyard, flanked by low buildings —stables on one side, cellars, wine-presses and store-houses on the other—he went out onto the balcony, and there, drinking his morning chocolate, he tried as usual to think it all out. Almost unconsciously, shocked by his feelings of the night before, he endeavoured to push the whole onus for them onto the Marchesa. He was fair-minded enough to ask himself why he should so much dislike her flirtations, and found, or thought he found, his answer. She was frivolous about Love; even that she could not take seriously. If she had had a despairing grand passion for someone, he could have forgiven or even approved it—but not this laughing lightness. He remembered his thoughts about the peasants on the road leading out of Gardone, on the day when he first heard of Miss Prestwich’s coming—that only things deeply felt affect the spirit. There was no merit, np value, in this mechanical reaction to a man’s attention, such as his Aunt displayed with both his Father and Roffredo.

  But these meditations did not console him much and, as was his habit in any distress, he eventually turned to Fräulein Gelsicher for reassurance and comfort. He found her in her room, her grey hair up, but still arrayed in her petticoat and cambric peignoir—to his disappointment Elena was with her, similarly attired, and in a high state of indignation over something. “But I do not want them” she was saying, tapping her governess on the shoulder with an open letter. “I tell you, Gela, that I do not want them! Neither here, nor at the picnic And nor does Marietta. They spoil everything, asking and prying; and grumbling! ‘Is not this grass damp? Should we not be better in the sun? Or perhaps in the shade? Teh-ha-ha-ha!’”—and she gave a very tolerable imitation of the Countess Roma’s foolish laugh.

  “What do the Sorellone want now?” Giulio enquired gloomily—he recognised the laugh.

  Elena wheeled round on him. “Ma, to come to this picnic that we are to have at Castel Vecchio,” she said, pouring out her words even while she kissed him. “And to stay two nights here, the one before and the one after! I have had Marietta’s note about it only last night, and already this morning they invite themselves! They impose on everyone. Why should we have them? They are bores and mischief-makers.”

  “You must have them because it is your duty to be courteous and even generous to relations, particularly those who are old, not rich, and like myself, unmarried,” the governess said calmly. “Go and write the note, Elena—the servant is waiting.”

  The girl went up and gave the Swiss woman a little shake. ‘You mean creature, Gela! You always use your spinsterhood and great antiquity as a stick to beat me with,” she said. “Very well—but I hate it, and I shall get even with them somehow.”

  “Make it graceful,” Fräulein Gelsicher admonished, unmoved, as Elena went out. Then she turned with a pleasant smile and said “Good-morning, Giulio. Can I do anything for you?”

  The young man fidgeted about the room for some moments before replying, picking up the things on the toilet-table and setting them down. At length, coming to a halt in front of Fräulein Gelsicher—“Gela, can nothing be done to stop this business between my Father and Zia Suzy?” he burst out. “It is so—unpleasant.”

  This was completely unexpected. The Swiss looked at him with concern, and then said, in her usual measured tones —“They are very old friends, Giulio.”

  “They are not friends at all!” he replied, explosively. “It is a regular flirt! She behaves with him just as she is beginning to do with Roffredo, only more so. Last night we saw them together when they did not know it—it was horrid. It is unseemly, Gela—one’s Father and one’s Aunt!”

  This was so precisely the governess’s own view that she found it hard to answer. She wondered exactly how much the boy had seen—without knowing that she was rather in the dark. Knowing Suzy, it might have been anything! She said very gravely—”Giulio, if you wish me to listen to statements like this, you must be more precise. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “Dunque, Miss Prestwich had been correcting my essay in the torrino, because it was so hot; and afterwards—” he rehearsed the small episode. “It was somehow particularly disagreeable, seeing it with her,” the boy concluded.

  “Did she speak of it?” Fräulein Gelsicher asked, relieved that it was no worse.

  “I did. I said I disliked Zia Suzy and her goings on. And she shut me up, and said she would not listen if I spoke so—”

  “Perfectly right,” Fräulein Gelsicher interjected.

  “But Gela,” the boy went on, more quietly now, “it is horrible. It made me feel horrible towards Papa. I do not think it is his fault—it is hers; but I dislike him for it, and I hate that. And it does no one any good, this flirtatious sort of love; it is a travesty. Love should engage the whole energy of the spirit, and teach the soul to use her wings still more. It aspires, or kneels; it does not flirt and laugh.” He went on in this strain for some time; Fräulein Gelsicher listened patiently, and now and then she sighed. Giulio treated her to these philosophical discourses occasionally, but she had never heard one on love before, and guessed, shrewdly enough, that Miss Prestwich was at the bottom of it. This was a complication she had early foreseen; and, once again, it was the Marchesa Suzy they had to thank for it—getting a girl like that for governess, with no enquiries! However, when Giulio had done she merely gave him a few quiet words on the unwisdom of attempting to judge others without full knowledge and comprehension. “You will find plenty to do to manage your own soul, my dear Giulio,” she ended up; “be a dutiful son and an affectionate brother, and leave your elders alone.” And s
ince he had been allowed to say his say, this rather flat admonition seemed to pacify the boy, and he took himself off to his work.

  Giulio di Castellone was not the only person in the Province of Gardone to spend that morning in disturbing thoughts. Miss Prestwich woke early, to see the eastern sun pouring through the olives outside her windows—it streamed into the room, making brilliant oblongs on the polished floor —oblongs with a little wavering pattern in them, which shifted as the leaves outside stirred in the breeze. She lay watching them, running her forefinger round the edges of the large squares of lace let into the coverlet on the bed, and thinking about herself and Roffredo di Castellone. Last night, what with the changing for dinner in a hurry, Giulio’s essay, and then the fuss he had made about the Count and the Marchesa, she had had no time to think the whole thing out— now she must, she must get it all straight.

  The emotion of love itself, we are told, does not greatly vary from age to age; but the preoccupations of those who love, with regard to it, do change from one generation to another. Today the main concern of serious young men and women who find themselves in love is to be sure that their emotion is a good sound genuine one, and that it is getting a free and healthy expression. They are a good deal less concerned with the social or even with the moral aspect—in fact for them this question of the genuineness or spuriousness of their love has practically become the moral aspect. All this was different thirty years ago. Serious young women, at any rate, in those days had very few doubts about the quality of their own feelings—they assumed their genuineness with touching simplicity. The important question was the nature of the young man’s love. Was it “pure”? (If one was sufficiently fond of him, one generally assumed that it was.) Would it lead to marriage? Did one love one’s young man more than one’s God? (This question actually occurred, more euphemistically expressed, in some of the little Communion handbooks of the period.) In fact the moral and social aspects were paramount. One wondered, after being kissed, “how much it meant”, and how to comport oneself.