by Ann Bridge
“Giulio, caro, how could I know? I am terribly sorry— unspeakably sorry, but do be reasonable,” Roffredo said. “I have told you that I regret it for her sake; it was not meant— and I regret it more for yours.” He still held his distracted cousin by the wrists, as gently as he could; Giulio’s struggles, which the other resisted as little as possible, drew them now in this direction, now in that, so that the two young men seemed to be performing a sort of agonised waltz round the room. “I had no idea of this,” Roffredo went on, endeavouring to say something soothing. “I thought you never cared for girls.”
“Girls! I do not. She is not as others! But to you she is; just a girl, one more instrument of your foul enjoyment. O, how I hate you. Will you let me go?” Giulio cried, almost beside himself.
“Yes, if you will go quietly,” Roffredo said. “Here, you can come out this way.” He let go of the other’s wrists, and walked calmly ahead of him to the door leading through to the workshop, opened it, passed on, and opened the further door into the garden. The quiet steadiness of his tone and movements did something to calm Giulio-he followed, making no attempt at any further onslaughts. At the garden door Roffredo turned. “Giulio, I am sorry” he said simply; “I wish you could believe it.”
His cousin ignored the appeal. “here is—she—now?” he asked, gulping a little over the pronoun.
“At Castellone. They came, the old Sorellone, yesterday morning (hearing, God and they alone know howl that she was here) and fetched her away. She stays there, for the present.”
There were other things that Giulio could have asked— why Miss Prestwich should be staying at Castellone, why Suzy had dismissed her. But the very sight and presence of Roffredo was so horrible to him that his one wish was to be gone. “So,” he said and turned and strode off down the path.
Roffredo walked slowly back through the workshop into his sitting-room. There he wiped his forehead, poured out another brandy-and-soda, took a gulp of it, and lighting a fresh cigarette, threw homself down again in the arm-chair. Perdition!—that was a scene! Who could have guessed such a thing? Giulio in love with her! If he had only known, he would not have said a word, he thought gloomily. Poor lad —and now he was gone off like a bear with a sore head. He put up his hand to his own head, and felt the bump rising just in front of the temple, where his cousin had struck him.
Even on Giulio, it appeared, one could not always count.
Giulio himself, meanwhile, strode away, walking as fast as his legs would carry him. Anything, anywhere, to get out of sight of that house, the scene of her degradation 1 As soon as he could he left the road, dreading to meet anyone he knew, and took the little smugglers’ path across the pastures. In his distress of mind he walked at random, and the small thread of the path as it were led him forward, past the Monte Sant Antonio, with Trino’s house set like a lump of rock on the further end, beside the formal oblong of the hornbeam hedges, and out into the country beyond. Here the ground was drier and more broken; watercourses with crumbling banks intersected it, and the pastures degenerated into rough indefinite herbage, set with bright wild-flowers—the boy’s heart contracted as he recognised some of the things which Miss Prestwich had brought home, named and rejoiced in. She had so loved them, bright and innocent as a flower herself —and now she was soiled and broken! Every thought of her was torture, let his mind turn which way it would. As he crossed a rise, still walking with that agonised speed, the long line of Castellone rose into view, on its ridge—it was as if it rose to hit him in the eyes. He checked his pace, stopped, and stood staring at the maroon-coloured eastern end. She was there, somewhere, in some room—feeling what? thinking what thoughts? He moaned, and covered his face with his hands. But some strange pitiful impulse drew him on towards it. Some distance from the village he crossed the road to Gardone, along which the Sorellone had driven the day before on their hurried expedition to the villa, and vaulted over the low stone wall which surrounded the whole Castellone domain. He climbed the slope beyond, over the dry brittle slippery grass, between the silvery trunks of the cypresses, until he struck a path leading along the level towards the house; he followed it round the curve of the ridge till he came in sight of the blunt maroon-coloured mass, with its blank bright windows and crenellated battlements. (It was, though mercifully Giulio did not know it, the very path along which Roffredo had led Almina on the day when she was taken to call at Castellone, and he first kissed her and told her that she was beautiful.) There, in the shelter of a group of laurels, the young man stood, gazing at those blank anonymous windows which sheltered the entity he cared most for in the world. His thought tried to pierce through them to her—he imagined her sitting, lying, speaking, praying, in tears—and every image increased his own torment. For one wild moment he thought of going to her—forcing his way in, taking her hand, declaring his love, his worship, his silent steadfast adorations But the thought of the Sorellone quenched this impulse; he saw them too, Roma with her greedy shameless curiosity for all that touched on love or sex, Aspasia with her harsh ironical phrases, her merciless cackling laugh. Giulio had at all times the shy young man’s timid hatred of elderly spinsters, and now he could not face them. He shivered at the thought of Almina—small, reticent —defenceless in their hands. Distraught afresh, he turned and hurried away, back along the path, down the slope, over the wall, and off across country towards Odredo.
The whole lay-out of Giulio’s character, his type of interior life, made this particular blow fall on him with especial weight. By nature and inclination he had at first so to speak jibbed at the female principle in general; having been conquered by the female principle in the person of Miss Prestwich, and having by her been introduced, as it were, to love, his cast of mind -then made him, sub-consciously, jib at the physical side of it, and stress its ethereal and spiritual aspects—less clear-sighted than his little cousin, he would have the object of his devotion to be “heavenly-minded”, and of a dazzling purity. To a preconception and an attachment such as this, Roffredo’s story was a peculiar agony. The pain and shock of it would have been great to any sensitive young man, for the first time in love; to Giulio they were crushing. He was accustomed to live by his mind, and his mind was quite unable to deal with this thing. He could find no reason for it, no sense or hope in it anywhere. Every thought of Almina—her past, her future, her love of Marietta, her help to him, his own work, his love—led back, as it were, to the divan at the Villa, darkly illuminated for him by Roffredo’s phrase, whose very tones rang in his head—“she was divine, like that.” And his mind found no means to counteract or allay or banish the torture of that thought; it seemed to run all through him, awakening sensations which filled him with disgust and shame.
His tormented mind drove his hurrying body homewards even faster than he had come. It was getting late, now, and the sun was very low; the hollows were damp pools of chill air, into which he descended; on the rising ground between them a sudden warmth, held by the vegetation from the full heat of the day, met him in waves, bearing the sweetish dusty smell of the ripened maize. At the time Giulio was not aware of noticing any of these things, but for years afterwards he hated that smell, when he met it on dusty paths at sundown. As he approached Odredo his pace slackened. He felt that he could not endure to see anyone, and yet he also felt that he could not bear this misery alone much longer. Climbing the track through the larch plantation from the Park towards the house, the thought of Marietta beckoned to him—to her, it would be possible to pour out his wretchedness; she had a trick of understanding, little and young as she was. And if he did not speak to someone, he felt as if some tangible part of him within would crack or break. As he came up onto the terrace he saw her; like a visitation from Heaven, sitting, already changed for dinner and alone, by the marble table under the stone pine, in her high-necked white dress, with her black shoes and stockings, and her heavy black sash. Heavenly visitations sometimes appear in very curious disguises; to Giulio di Castellone that childish figur
e brought an incredible sense of—really soulagement is the only precise European word. He went over to her.
She looked up and saw him. She realised at once that, somehow, he had heard. She rose very quietly, walked round the table to him, and slid her little thin arm, in its ridiculous puffed sleeve, through his. “Come and walk, dear Giulio,” she said. “Come along the ridge.”
On the stone pine ridge, tonight, there was a new scent. Along the southern brow, at the Odredo end, a straggling hedge (which in the Italian manner sheltered nothing and divided nothing from anything) extended for a couple of hundred yards—a hedge of a curious rambling shrub, stiff enough to stand upright, but throwing out long trailing branches like a rambler rose, each branch set close with small stiff leaves, green above, below of a whitish silver powdered with minute lustrous bronze spots, and bearing small thick-set creamy flowers, also specked with bronze, which exhaled an extraordinary fragrance, something between orange-blossom and mignonette. Miss Prestwich had been charmed with this plant even before it flowered, and had endeavoured to find out its name, but none of the family knew it, and Gino, the old Odredo gardener, referred to it vaguely as “quel rampicante.” It had just come into flower, and the sweet heavy scent loaded the air on the whole ridge as the cousins passed along it. They walked for some time in silence. It was Marietta who spoke first. As they approached one of the seats—“Giulio, I know,” she said.
He stopped and turned to her, then.
“I fed that I can’t bear it,” he said, with a curious simplicity. “I do not see how I am going to bear it. I told you—you know what I feel about her. And now she—he—” a sort of spasm contracted his features. “I loved him, too, you see,” he said irrelevantly.
“Who told you?” Marietta asked.
“He did. I went over to see him, to congratulate him. And he then told me—quite lightly, as if it were a small thing! —what he had done. I do not really understand it—why she was sent away, and so on. But this was quite clear, what happened between them there. He said they were both drunk!” the young man said, in a tone of agonised distaste. “But she—if you think what she must also feel! I do not see,” he said again, “how one can bear it.”
She had loosed his arm when he turned to her, and stood now in front of him, her eyes on his face. “Darling Giulio, I know,” she said again. “Oh, I am sorry. It is no use trying to tell you how sorry I am. I too, you know, love her. But I feel—oh, that somehow it is not real, all this; that it has nothing to do with her”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“A person who is tipped out of a boat and drowned has not committed suicide. It is like that.”
“But they are drowned just the same,” he said, wearily. He moved over to the seat as he spoke, and sat down on it; he felt suddenly very tired.
She followed him, and sat down too.
“Yes, but their soul is not the same,” she pursued. “In Purgatory, to that degree it stands upright—it was not cowardly—it did not surrender to despair. There is that difference. And in this—she may have loved him, indeed I think she did; but that, without being married—she would not have done it.”
As she spoke, there slipped into Giulio’s mind the recollection of his thoughts about the peasants, months ago now, when he walked out of Gardone on the very day that he first heard of Miss Prestwich’s coming to Vill’ Alta. He had thought about it again since, more than once, but he had never really settled to his satisfaction whether or not it was true that only conscious experiences affect the soul. That seemed to be also Marietta’s idea. But the thought slipped in and slipped out again—for the moment something else had caught his attention.
“Why do you think that she loved—him?” he asked—he could not easily speak Roffredo’s name.
“I just think it—it was my impression,” the child said; “I do not know it.”
“He said so,” Giulio muttered miserably, half to himself. Then, stung by the recollection of his cousin’s complacent tone as he said “We were on very good terms”, he turned on her, suddenly furious. “You said yourself that day at Vill’ Alta, after the thunder, that you did not know of which sort her love was—like ours, or like his! Why did you say that? Did you know something? That she was going with him then, perhaps?”
The child remained perfectly steady. “No. I knew nothing, and I don’t know anything now, but what you know. That she went there that night to him, was— was Mama’s fault,” she said, with a quivering mouth. “She had no money. That, I can’t really understand! But it seems it was so. And I do not really know much about any sort of love—except that they all seem to make people either cruel or miserable!
said that, that day, because—I did not know, I just felt that she might love differently to you. But Giulio,” she said earnestly, the tears standing in her eyes—“of whatever sort Postiche’s love may be, remember that she is good. You know that. Hold on to that.”
For the moment he seemed to listen to this, and to be quieted by it. “Come back, now,” she said, rising and tugging gently at his arm—“come on, Giulio.” That they would be late for dinner was in her mind, but she did not speak of it. He came with her, obediently, and they walked back through the overpowering sweetness distilled by the flowering hedge. But suddenly he broke out again- “She is good, yes, as you say—but she has been dishonoured, deflowered, as if she were of the lowest! Nothing can alter that, nothing, nothing! That is done; that is so.” He spoke like a person in a violent passion—his hands were shaking, his mouth worked, his face was very white. Marietta was frightened by his state. She made no further attempt at argument or consolation; murmuring all the time “Come, dear Giulio; come; come on,” she led him into the house by one of the garden doors, and upstairs, and into his room. As they reached it, the great bell which hung outside the house above the courtyard clanged out its deep musical notes, announcing dinner.
“Stay here,” the child said. “You can have something upstairs. I will find Gela. Stay where you are.” And she flew off in search of Fräulein Gelsicher.
She met her just leaving her room. “Ah, you are dressed —that is right,” the governess said pleasantly.
“Gela, can you come back to your room for a minute? Yes, I know we shall be late, but I must speak to you,” the child said, pulling imperiously at her arm. After one glance at her face, the governess agreed. In her room she drew down the long embroidered bell-pull, saying “Wait a moment”; the resultant tinkling was followed almost instantly by Annina’s entrance.
“Tell Umberto to ask the Signor Conte and the Contessina not to wait—we shall be down presently.” Then, as the door closed behind the maid, she turned to Marietta. Elena, with her customary impulsive frankness, had already made a clean breast of her revelations to Marietta, and had also imparted to her governess her little cousin’s injunctions on the subject of Giulio; to her surprise (and slightly to her annoyance) Fräulein Gelsicher had shown herself perfectly aware of this further complication. She had wasted no time on blaming Elena; she enquired carefully into Marietta’s reception of the news, sighed, poked at her hair, and said—“Well, Giulio at any rate we must shield if we can,” and left it at that. But she was quite prepared for severe distress on the little girl’s part, and this sudden application did not surprise her in the least. Fräulein Gelsicher had a very sound sense of values; dinner, though normally at Odredo it was fixed as a Median law, was of secondary importance at a moment like this.
Marietta’s first words did surprise her, however.
“It is Giulio,” she said. “He has heard. He went over to Roffredo, just to congratulate him, this afternoon, knowing nothing!—and Roffredo told him. And Gela, for him it is fearful. He loves her so, you see.” She poured her words out in a swift cataract, with the light delicate emphasis she always used, which made her speech so charming. “He is almost ill with it—he is quite wild. When he told me, I said what I could, but really he hardly hears. So I have taken him to his room and told h
im to stay there. He cannot come down—he is not fit. I think you should go to him.”
Fräulein Gelsicher studied the child’s face. She was rather touched and moved by her concern for Giulio, in the midst of her own distress, but she said nothing about that. She went straight to the main point.
“Did Roffredo tell him—everything?”
“About the seduction? Oh yes,” the child said with a sort of matter-of-fact hopelessness. “Just the one thing he should never have known. And he cannot bear it. Please go to him, Gela. I think he should have a sleeping-draught.”
“Yes, I will go,” the governess said. “And you, my child —you will go down to dinner? This is all very distressing for you, too.”
Marietta turned away. “Oh yes, I will go. I am all right,” she said, in a rather unsteady voice. Then she turned towards the Swiss again. “Only Gela, please do not send me back to Vill’ Alta just yet,” she said, speaking now with great intensity. “I feel I cannot go there just now. Mama—this is all through her, this misery for so many! I do not understand it, really” —she put up her two hands to her small closely-brushed dark head and held it. “Giulio—and Postiche herself! And Gela, Postiche is good! I have been with her so much, I know her better than anyone. Roffredo may have flirted with her and made her love him to some extent, but she would never have been immoral. About that I am certain. Mama did not know her as I did. Oh, I do not understand it!” she said again. “But you will let me stay?”
“Yes, you shall certainly stay for the present,” Fräulein Gelsicher assured her. That distracted gesture of the child’s hands, coupled with the self-restraint, the pitiful effort at loyalty of her words, gave the governess the measure of her distress and conflict. “You shall stay—indeed we shall be very glad to have you, my child,” she said, and hurried along the passage to Giulio.
Chapter Twenty-three
One might really compare those three houses, Castellone, Odredo and Vill’ Alta, during the days that followed Miss Prestwich’s dismissal, to three anthills, flung into a feverish intensity of activity and busy stirring movement, as by the careless poking of a child’s stick, by the Marchesa Suzy’s action. Suzy herself was almost as surprised as a child who pokes an anthill for the first time, by the results of her thrust. She had dismissed a little governess, of whose behaviour she disapproved—however mistaken the manner of it (and she was forced to admit that the manner had been mistaken), that was really all; and lo, those dull orderly mounds of earth were instantly covered with seething life—different generations ran to and fro, antennae waved as ant took counsel with ant, measures were taken, grubs (Giulio and Marietta) were protected, an ant-like moral fervour reigned. (Ants, as the author of the Book of Proverbs long ago noticed, are highly moral creatures.)