by Ann Bridge
“I shall reflect about it first,” the governess repeated.
She did both think and watch during the next few days; and what she noticed, once put on the track, entirely confirmed Elena’s impression. The young Marchesa’s preoccupation with Count Roffredo she had already noticed with her usual calm disapproval; but this fresh development disturbed her much more. She considered the possibility of giving a word of warning to her little colleague; but the girl’s extreme discretion in all her visible behaviour gave small handle for it, and Fräulein Gelsicher did not like acting on suspicion, or on the gossip of servants. The proper person to have watched and warned was her employer, the Marchesa Suzy— and she was being far more indiscreet than the governess, Fräulein Gelsicher thought bitterly. And the gravamen of the warning it was impossible to give—that Miss Prestwich should beware of arousing the jealousy of her pupil’s mother about a young man for whose affection they were rivals! What an impossible and undignified situation.
In her concern, she thought, as before, of taking La Vecchia Marchesa into her confidence. But she dreaded upsetting her; the hundredth birthday, to which the whole circle of relations attached an almost superstitious importance was little more than six weeks off, and the old lady had only recently undergone the strain of the consiglio difamiglia. In the end Fräulein Gelsicher decided to leave it for the moment, and trust to the Marchesa’s tact and savoir faire not to let matters come to a head. After all, she had always managed such things very well before. It was surprising, the Swiss thought with cold matter-of-factness, that she should be so careless of appearances this time.
The reason for Suzy’s relative disregard of appearances in the matter of Count Roffredo was simple enough, although Fräulein Gelsicher did not hit on it—it was largely an impulse of feminine jealousy. Having once suspected that there was something between him and the governess, and having decided to detach him and annex him, so to speak, herself, it became almost a matter of policy with Suzy to display his flirtation with her, rather than to conceal it. In a way, too, it was a kindness to do it, and stop the silly little thing getting absurd ideas into her head. That, at least, was how it began. She did not bother about it very much—Suzy had a light touch as a rule. And she was very well content with life. Bonne-Mama was extraordinarily well, and the birthday was now such a little way off, surely she would remain well for those few more weeks. The little governess was quiet enough; she seemed to have taken the hint, and subsided. And she herself was seeing a very satisfying amount of Roffredo. He always accepted her little notes of invitation, and was constantly at Vill’ Alta.
But presently a gradual change began to come over the gay contentment of her feelings. Once or twice, when Roffredo had been over to Vill’ Alta for tennis, and had stayed on to dinner, they went for a stroll afterwards along the stone pine ridge. Slightly to her surprise, he insisted on taking her down into the shelter of the privet bushes before kissing her. She put this down to the fervour of his feelings, and was not displeased; in fact, he was merely afraid of being seen by Almina. But her seduction exercised its usual power, and he did kiss her, with energy and passion. She was strangely moved by this; she actually trembled in his arms, and asked herself, almost incredulously, if she were really falling in love again at last?
It must be realised that for a woman of Suzy’s temperament and experiences the exercise of her powers of seduction and, so to speak, the practice of passion, were almost ends in themselves—an art and a form of self-expression; done as normally, or nearly, as the artist paints or the musician plays. Automatically confronted with a new human being—man, woman, or child—she set about charming it; when it was a man, certain specific results usually followed. To a greater or less degree, he was subjugated; and graciously, skilfully— kindly, really—according to the degree of his infatuation, she let the affair follow its course to its natural conclusion, whether that was a mere flirtation, a passionate interlude, or a regular liaison. But as the musician plays through a variety of uninspiring works merely to keep his hand in, and the artist makes studies of certain effects which he wishes to master, though they will never be completed pictures, so, in by far the greater number of these affairs, Suzy di Vill’ Alta’s own emotions were not very deeply involved. Her capacity for passion might be exercised, but her peace was not disturbed.
But with Roffredo di Castellone she was beginning to realise that the case was different. Sometimes as she lay in her hammock on the terrace awaiting him, the sight of his tall easy figure, suddenly appearing in the gloom of the doorway at the top of the steps brought such a rush of tenderness, or delighted joy, that she could hardly master it enough to give him her gay cool greeting. This was astonishing to Suzy. And her appearance became of new importance to her. Secure in her beauty and her timeless charm, she had drifted into the middle thirties almost without thought, seeing the harmonious ensemble which she steadily presented to the world in general reflected back at her in a thousand admiring glances; thorough and careful, in a business-like way, about her toilette, she had not seriously questioned her looks. Now a new imperative need to see herself with Roffredo’s eyes sent her questioning to the great silver mirror with the folding wings, which stood in the centre of her vast toilet-table, with its lace-covered top and its white satin flounces. She sat there for a long time, one night; she dismissed Agnese, her maid, as soon as she had unhooked her dress and taken it away, with a curt intimation that she would do her own hair. When the woman had gone she sat gazing into the silvery depths, where her face, softly lit by the candles on the table, stood out white against the dark liquid background of the shadowy room, trying to see what Roffredo had seen an hour before. The throat was perfect still—she had not le cou usé like so many women—the eyes superb. But the chin, the jaw—were they getting a little heavy.’ She tilted one ©f the wings and examined them from an angle, thoughtfully. No, they were all right still. But the sense of time came to her as she sat, looking at the picture of a beautiful woman in the shadowed mirror; she did what she had never done before— she envisaged the future. And that brought a sense of urgency to the present which it had never borne yet. Looking in the glass, she had none of the common fears of its being her last chance to attract a man; but it might well be that she would never again feel so deeply, so joyfully, herself. Then, if this was the last time, now that love was again awake, let her have it in fulness and perfection!—so her stirred heart cried. Slowly, she slipped the chiffon peignoir down off her shoulders, so that the whole white splendour gleamed opposite her, in the heavy silver frame. Yes, let her taste the whole! She closed the wings over the mirror, as if to shut in the picture; shook down her hair, undressed swiftly, blew out the candles and got into bed. She lay there with the sense of a resolution taken—half joyous, half alarmed. Strange how young her heart was still!
Outside, among the stiff black shapes of the stone pines on the Odredo ridge, a man’s figure went stumbling down through the bushes to the road. It was Roffredo, finding his way back to his car, after putting another note for Almina under the cap of the next largest stink-horn.
Chapter Fourteen
Her cousin Elena’s recent observations on Marietta contained a good deal of truth. It was the fact that such of her attention as was given to human beings at all was chiefly concentrated on one or two people, who were really important to her—for the rest, though amiable and affectionate, she slipped about between human relationships like a little fish, skimming easily and gracefully, but making no close or lasting contact. Her relation to her Mother, for instance, was rather peculiar—Elena had made by no means a bad shot at it. Her Mother stood in the child’s mind like a sort of statue, dressed, as images in continental churches are sometimes dressed, in all sorts of rich trappings of perfection —her beauty, her social skill, her gaiety, her kindness, her warm laughter. But she was, to her own daughter, ultimately an abstraction; they never reached one another; there was between them no real intimacy such as existed, holding fast acro
ss their vast disparity of ages, between Marietta and La Vecchia Marchesa. The two people who really occupied the child’s attention at present were her cousin Giulio and Miss Prestwich.
Marietta had become surprisingly devoted to her governess. Almina’s real love of knowledge for its own sake, her scholarly attitude to the glory and value of pure learning (acquired at Oxford, where, thirty years ago, women students had an attitude of discipleship which would be unrecognisable and incredible today) answered an untutored but profound instinct of Marietta’s nature. That had been the first link., Then Miss Prestwich’s youth and the honest simplicity which Elena found so amusing were curiously appealing and endearing to the young girl. Not yet fully or adequately interested in people as such, her scanty attention, when it was directed to them, found most grown-ups baffling and puzzling; but this simplicity offered no puzzles—it was comfortable and restful. And her instinct—that dog-like instinct by which the attachments of a child are formed—recognised and saluted the real goodness and integrity of the English girl’s character; her immature mind, struggling confusedly to shape the values that were to make its world—which is the supreme task of adolescence—was supported by Miss Prestwich’s small disciplines and her rigid sense of right and wrong, even when that seemed to her, as to her cousin, so unwonted as to be slightly comic. The bright hot weeks of that summer in the Province were an extraordinarily happy time for Marietta—her intelligence, nourished by the fresh knowledge and ideas which Miss Prestwich provided, grew, expanded, flowered; her feelings grew too, stimulated by the constant companionship of the two people she cared most for in the world—fresh possibilities of intercourse, new points of contact with other minds, opened before her eager eyes. Her world began to take shape—and a safe and happy shape.
But during the last week or so she had become aware of some vague element of disturbance in this happy atmosphere —like the sudden harsh cry, on a day still hot and cloudless, of a peacock, presaging rain. It was the cry of the peacocks at Vill’ Alta which put this idea into her head, one afternoon. It was followed during the night by the warning clamour of the bells of all the churches of the plain, and later, at dawn, by a calamitous storm of thunder and hail, which swept down from the mountains, flattening the maize and cruelly battering the just-ripening grapes. (In those days, in the Province of Gardone, hail in the mountains, made known by the telegraph, was announced by a tocsin from every village campanile, to warn the peasants to do all they could to protect their crops.) Marietta, walking out next day and seeing the resulting ruinous desolation, felt again a vague disquiet. With both Giulio and her dear Postiche, she felt that there were things going on which she could not quite fathom.
Her feeling for Giulio was turning imperceptibly into something rather more mature—more watchful, less blindly adoring. She had at first rejoiced in the pleasure he took in Miss Prestwich’s instruction, and indeed in her presence; it had seemed a pupilship like her own, and a further link between the two of them. But just lately she thought she had seen traces of another feeling. She could not be sure— the very young are curiously reluctant to trust the evidence of their eyes, and still more to trust the promptings of that sixth sense which, by glimmers or flashes of intuition, informs the unobservant and indifferent as to what is going on about them. Such glimmers were troubling Marietta now about Giulio, and about Postiche too. She was half aware of something at work in Miss Prestwich, something more profound than could be accounted for by what was obvious in Roffredo’s manner to her, his laughing evident admiration.
And as the harsh pealing of the bells had followed on the peacock’s cry, so confirmation of one part of her hesitant suspicions followed quickly on her first forebodings. On the day of the storm there was to have been tennis at Vill’ Alta, and as the sun was shining brilliantly again by the afternoon, a good many people turned up for it, including Elena and Giulio. The courts however proved to be too sodden for play, and the young people amused themselves indoors with charades, paper games, and bean bags, then a very fashionable pursuit, in which small silken bags containing beans were flung from hand to hand down two lines of people, the object being to see which line could transfer its whole stock of bags from one end to the other first. Every large house in the Province kept a supply of bags against such eventualities as this.
Marietta noticed that Giulio was clumsy and absentminded; when the onset of paper games released him from the enforced membership of his team, he disappeared. She slipped out after him, and found him, as she expected, up in the schoolroom, perched on a low settee under the window, a copy-book at his side, reading a book—to her surprise she saw that it was Dante’s La Vita Nuova. She seated herself beside him, without comment, and looked over his shoulder. Giulio, also without comment, shoved the book in her direction till it rested on her knee, so that she might read too— much of their intercourse was conducted with this wordless ease. He was reading the sonnet in which Dante describes Beatrice’s complexion:
Color di perla quasi informa, quale
Conviene a donna aver, non fuor’ misura;
Ella é quanto di ben può far’ natura;
Per esempio di lei, beltà si prova.
(“Of the colour of a rough pearl, such as is suited to a gentlewoman—not too high; she is the most that Nature can do; beauty itself is measured by her likeness.”)
Marietta read it, and her light breathing quickened with a little pang of fore-knowledge.
“I had thought I would make a translation of it for her— she likes me to do translations,” Giulio said at length—”but it is too difficult, I think.” He tapped his teeth with a pencil, meditatively. “It is like her, isn’t it?” he said, turning round now to his little cousin. “She has just that broken-pearl complexion, with hardly any colour—and her little air of quality! They say Beatrice was fair, too.”
“Yes—I suppose she is like,” the girl said, a little hesitatingly. “Only I think Beatrice was more heavenly-minded.”
‘Why do you say that? Do you think she is earthlyminded?” Giulio asked, in a disturbed voice.
“No no—not that. I don’t really know why I said it. Let me think,” Marietta said, pressing her small thin fingers over her eyes, a gesture Giulio knew well. “Yes, this is it— Postiche is good, and her mind turns towards Heaven, but she has—she has somehow a lot of links with earth; and Beatrice—as Dante makes her out, anyhow—had hardly any links with earth at all, except other people’s eyes, holding her there.”
Giulio considered this. “That is good and true, what you say about Beatrice,” he said at length,; “but what do you mean about Miss Prestwich?” (Giulio would never use the name ‘Postiche’) “I think she is very much turned to Heaven. What are her ‘links with earth’?”
“I cannot say exactly. But I feel that it is more than just our eyes holding her there!” Marietta said, with a sparkle of amusement.
“If you do not know what you mean, I don’t think you ought to say things like that,” Giulio said, a little discontentedly. “I think she is more turned to heaven than anyone I know. She is so good, and pure, and gentle, and loyal”—he broke off, thinking of his scene with her on the night when they had come on the Marchesa and his Father. He could not tell Marietta about that. But the recollection of it moved him strongly, and when he spoke again, his voice vibrated with feeling. “She is more good than you can know; bad things slip off her spirit; everything that is noble and beautiful finds a welcome and a home in her. Oh Marietta, you and I have never known anyone like her, and we never shall again!” the young man said, turning dark impassioned eyes on the child.
Marietta sat gazing back at him; in her crumpled white dress, with her long black legs and black plaits, she was a very childish figure, but her face at that moment was not childish— Donatello’s St. John the Baptist had given way to the Medusa, her delicate mouth open in a voiceless circle of despair. And her words, when at last she spoke, were not childish either. “Dear Giulio, do you love her?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Perhaps not. I don’t know much about love. But she has filled my life, since she came, with—well, with a new meaning; and that meaning is beautiful. I could kneel to her—I want to, sometimes, but it would be silly, and it might vex her. She is so sensible!— and she has no idea, I am sure, how good she is.”
Marietta took a deep breath, like a swimmer before a plunge. “That is love,” she said, with great finality. “One sort—our sort, yours and mine.”
“You have no sort yet!” he said, smiling—he put out his hand and fondled the dark head. “Little Marietta!”
The young girl, quite gently, moved her head aside.
“It will be my sort, then, when I have a sort.” she said, getting up.
“What is the other sort?” he asked, rather dreamily.
“Elena’s!” she answered with decision. “And Roffredo’s too,” She stopped abruptly, as if she had meant to say something more.
“You know a lot! And hers?” Giulio asked.
“I don’t know which sort hers will be,” the child said. “Come on, Giulio, we ought to go down.”
“But surely hers will be the same as ours?” he asked, almost urgently, catching her arm.