Enchanter's Nightshade

by Ann Bridge

  She turned at once. “Oh, are you? I am so glad. How has this been settled?”

  “Oh, Bonne-Mama, of course! And Gela. She told her that I wished it, and so it was done. Bonne-Mama just sent for Papa and told him he must do it! And he agreed. She is like that.”

  “She is very good,” the girl agreed fervently. “Do you know what she has arranged for—for me?” she asked, rather shyly.

  “About Germany? Yes, she told me yesterday. Are you glad?” he asked slowly, his face clouding a little.

  “Oh, so glad! It will be wonderful if it can really be arranged,” the girl said eagerly. “Then I need not—I need not go home,” she ended lamely. Embarrassment supervened once more.

  He sat looking rather gloomily at her. “Shall you ever go to England, if you take that post?” he asked at length.

  “Oh, I suppose so. Sometimes, in the holidays. It is not so far as here. Why?”

  “I had thought, if I was in England, that I might see you occasionally,” he said. “I had hoped it.”

  “If you don’t always come back here in the Long” (she used the idiom of her day) “I expect I should be at home then, some of the time. But I imagine you will come home, won’t you?” she said.

  He hadn’t understood her, naturally.

  “And I might come and see you?” he pursued.

  In her turn she looked a little troubled. She had hoped to cut off all connection with Gardone, with everyone who knew of her disaster. Giulio at Beamington would be rather more than she had bargained for—talked to by her Mother with that disarming confidential affection, cross-examined by May! Something might come out.

  He was watching her face, and he saw her hesitation. A quite unwonted instinct, born of his love (Giulio was not at all good at instincts) prompted him to the right move.

  “I hope you will let me come,” he said. “I shall wish to, I think, very much. I—there is something I have to say to you,” he brought out, with a jerk. She turned, surprised, and sat looking at him with perfectly unsuspecting calm, while he remained, stuck fast in embarrassment. “I—I shall not say it well; you must forgive me; I have never said, never thought such a thing before,” the boy brought out at last, almost stammering in his nervous haste. And as she looked at him, with her clear grey eyes, in mounting astonishment— “I love you so much!” he burst out.

  Almina was, quite simply, astounded. “ Me?” she said, incredulously.

  “Yes, you—who else? Who is like you? With knowledge, and goodness—it seems to me that you have everything! Everything that one needs; everything to satisfy, to rest the heart—and to raise the spirit. I have never known anyone who approached you.”

  She sat absolutely still, looking at him. It was incredible. He was saying these things to her, now? After what had happened? Or did he perhaps not know?

  “Count Giulio, do you know why I am leaving?” she said, slowly and stiffly, but on an irrepressible impulse.

  “Of course! I know everything,” he answered, the colour flying into his pale face. “In fact, Roffredo told me himself” he said, with characteristic impulsive tactlessness. “O cara signorina, what is it?” he cried distressfully, as she hid her face in her hands. “Oh, forgive me—I told you I should say it badly!—you see I have never loved anyone before. Do forgive me!”

  From behind the girl’s hands came a funny little sound, between a laugh and a sob. “And still you say this to me?” she said, taking her hands away, and looking at him.

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “Why not? Everyone knows it was not your fault.” And as she turned her head away again, he took her hand and kissed it. “I love you, cara Almina,” he said gravely. “I think I had better stick to that, for if I try to say anything else, I trip on something which hurts you! That is natural—there is so much to hurt you just now; you have been so much hurt! But if you will let me love you, perhaps you will forget that, a little.”

  The tears gathered in her eyes.

  “Count Giulio, you are very good to me. I cannot understand this at all,” she said, lamely and vaguely.

  “Can you not? But it has been so, almost from the first moment you came,” he said earnestly. “I used to think women were—well, were somehow unhelpful, a hindrance to my life, except Gela. But then in you I found everything I valued— like in Gela, only with more learning. And with—” he looked at her very shyly, and raised her hand to his lips again —“with beauty as well,” he said.

  She found nothing to say but “Oh.” But Giulio was now well started, and needed little help from her. Sitting on the seat under the ilexes, in front of that lovely blue circle of mountain crests, he proceeded to give in his own person an admirable illustration of a very true and percipient saying of Vico’s, quoted by his own favourite philosopher—“I ragazzi sono i migliori poeti.” (Young men are the best poets.) His reverence, his adoration, his pain, the delicate ardours which, now that he saw her again, seemed to spring from it, and the shy hopes which leapt to birth from the very telling of his love to her, so face to face—all this came pouring out, expressed with a directness which had the very quality of poetry. The girl, listening in a sort of stilled wonder, was suddenly reminded of that evening at Pisignacco, when they strolled together through the little streets under the stars, waiting for the carriage. Even then, all drugged as she was with her love for Roffredo, she had recognised something of the vital comprehension that had informed the speech which flowed between them, and even their silences; now, undrugged and disillusioned, fully awake, the reality of Giulio suddenly knocked at her heart and mind. For the first time she really saw him. He was not just a moody difficult bookish boy; he was a person, a lovable and valuable person, single-minded in his passion for truth as in his passion for her, someone who with all his immaturity and his faults did, ultimately, conform to those standards which in Roffredo’s case she had flung aside, to surrender to physical charm. And he was offering her his whole soul’s worship, in words which rang like the words of songs. Further than that, at the moment, in her astonishment, she did not go; the numbed dryness of her heart, scorched by the blast of her passion for Roffredo, would not react or respond at once. But when he had gone, after a farewell from which their shyness could not quite exclude a stirred tenderness, she sat on alone, quietly wondering, and astonishingly raised in spirit. This declaration had done, would go on doing for her, something that nothing else could have achieved at that moment—nothing less than the rebuilding of her shattered personality, the re-creation of her belief in herself. The old Marchesa had begun it; but this went far further. And she was never to know that it was the old Marchesa who had told the boy, when she gave him the note as an excuse for finding Miss Prestwich alone in the garden, to do just that. “Tell her what is in your heart—and don’t forget to kiss her hand!”

  Old ladies of a hundred do in fact know a great deal.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The one-hundredth birthday of the old Marchesa di Vill’ Alta dawned as one of those still, blue-and-golden days which make late September in the Province of Gardone a reminder of Ovid’s Golden Age. On such days, there, one expects to see perfect beings, moving with simple gladness among the golden maize, under the yellow poplars, lifting calm brows to the blue circle of mountains beyond the white trunks of the trees, and plucking the red strawberry-like berries which hang glowing among the dark foliage of the arbutus. One does not see them; but one expects them to appear, so complete is the Latin perfection of light and landscape and clear simplified colour. So the day dawned, and so it moved to its still and quiet close.

  The Vill’ Alta carriage arrived early at Castellone, and carried Miss Prestwich through the yellow fields to the grey house on the hill. Tommaso’s straw Homburg swayed slightly against the sky in front of her, the green and beige carriage rug shrouded her knees, the hairs of the fat white horses blew back and settled on her sleeves. It was all as it had been, she thought, on the day of her arrival. And the likeness was completed when, as the carr
iage approached the little gate in the wall, the iron whined on the stone, and Marietta ran out, her black plaits flying, her face alight, to greet her governess. She carried her off to the torrino, avoiding the family gathering of sons and daughters which had assembled during the previous two days at the house, and they sat there, the two of them, the child’s arm tucked confidingly through that of Miss Prestwich. “Oh, I have so wanted to see you! I have so missed you! It has not been at all nice without you,” the little creature said, and flung her arms round Almina’s neck, and hugged her almost with passion.

  “I wish you were not going away,” she said presently, sitting back and looking at her companion—“but I see that it is best; necessary. You would not be happy here, now. Oh, how difficult love is!” the child said, unexpectedly. “There are so many sorts—and they all seem to hurt people! They die, like Zia Nadia—after all, she really died for love; or they are ill, as Giulio was; or terribly hurt, like you. Do you mind my saying that?” she asked.

  “Marietta darling, I don’t mind what you say,” Almina said. Somehow with her little pupil there was no embarrassment.

  “I am glad. I do think that for today, for this last time”— the delicate Donatello mouth quivered a little—“I think that you and I might speak freely. Oh, I have been so—so suffocated at Odredo, really speaking to no one. I have never needed to speak much before,” the child said with great simplicity—“because until all this happened, there was not much to say. But now—how I have needed you to speak with! Gela was so worried about Giulio, and Elena—I love her, but she is not always discreet, and she will take such a mondaine view of things, it does not suit me! And Giulio was ill, and Bonne-Mama I have not seen.”

  “What is it you most wished to speak of?” Almina asked— her sense of loving responsibility for her pupil rose up again then, and overcame any private feelings of shyness.

  “Oh, you—what happened; and Mama. About you, I see it clearly, I think; that it did not touch you; that it was an accident, not you. I said that to Giulio, when he was so miserable, but he was no good to talk to, then. Yes, though I have been—oh, so sorry about you, I am not disturbed, really; only it would have been nice to speak of it, because it was swelling in me, here—” she pressed her hands against her small breast. “No, the worst has been Mama.”

  “She is better, now, is she not?” Almina asked—even at that moment her English governessy instinct prompted this slight wilful misunderstanding.

  “Yes, oh yes. It is not that. It is what she did to you, and the reason. I find that so hard to understand—and to bear. Mama—” she looked away to where the swifts wheeled in the soft blue above the road, as if she were pursuing a thought that flew and wheeled like a bird—“Mama has always been—oh, very important to me, though I really see her very little; she has not the time for much conversation with me” the little girl said simply. “And so, that she should do something wrong and cruel, not in a mistake, she who is always kind and generous to others—I have felt that I could not bear it! And to do it on account of someone like Roffredo, who is really not very valuable.” She paused again, and then looked round quickly at Almina. “That is tactless of me. But perhaps now you yourself see what I mean, cara Postiche?”

  Almina, with a rising colour, gave a little nod. The child squeezed her hand affectionately, and administered a quick kiss.

  “So,” she said, in a tone which made Almina almost laugh, it was so like the abrupt finality with which Marietta’s grandmother used that particular monosyllable. “Of course,” she went on, “I am accustomed to people paying court to Mama, and even having flirts with her—she is so beautiful and gay, one expects that; I do not mind it. But to let such things make her unjust and cruel—that—oh, it does make me so miserable,” the poor child said, and put her head down on Miss Prestwich’s shoulder.

  A month, a week even, before, Almina would have been quite incapable of dealing with this situation in any way that would have been of the smallest real use to her pupil. She would, with the utmost kindness and rectitude, have damped the discussion down, and told Marietta that it was no concern of hers, that all she had to do was to be good herself, and other meritorious but unsatisfying platitudes. Now, stroking the child’s head, she thought quickly, and on quite new lines. And at last, still doubtfully, but on an imperative impulse, she spoke.

  “I can understand that,” she said slowly; “how you feel, I mean. But, Marietta, because I have—loved—Count Roffredo myself,” her voice was a little unsteady—“I think I can understand about her too. He has a sort of spell about him, when he chooses; it is like a kind of magic. It might move one to anything.” And as her pupil raised her head, and looked at her with wide and rather astonished eyes, she went on—“And she—perhaps I ought not to say this to you, but I think he was possibly careless with her too; pretending to more love than he felt, and not thinking about her feelings. And I was Wrong not to tell her about him—I see that. It put her in a false position.” She hesitated, and then said— “Since you have heard so much, I feel you ought to know all this too; to realise that it may all have been much harder for her than you can understand. She may—I think she must have felt deceived, both by him and by me; and that would make one very angry.”

  The child looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “I see that—I do see it. I am glad you have told me this.” And suddenly she flung her arms round Miss Prestwich again, burying her face. “Postiche, you have no idea how good you are!” she exclaimed. “Oh, how glad I am that I have seen you today!” She raised her head to look into her face. “No one else could have told me this, helped me in this way.”

  Almina was touched, and thankful too. Even in her own troubles, she had given quite a lot of thought to the repercussions on Marietta of all this affair. She decided to go on.

  “I am glad this has helped you,” she said steadily. “It is very important, I think, how one feels to one’s Mother. I should have been very unhappy if you had been—had been at cross-purposes with the Marchesa because of me.”

  Marietta looked at her consideringly. “What is your Mother like?” she asked suddenly.

  “My Mother?” Almina too considered. It was difficult to think of Mrs. Prestwich in connection with the Marchesa Suzy; the whole structure of English life, so different to that which she had come to know in Italy, stood between the two women. The idea of men paying court to her Mother, of “flirts”, even of the most innocent description, going on in the house at Beamington was so wildly improbable as to be almost comic. But Marietta’s question made her think, for the first time in her life, of her Father and Mother as two human beings, a man and a woman, who had had a relationship which—once at least—must have borne some resemblance to that between her and Roffredo. It was a startling thought. Absorbed in it, she was silent for a long time. She could not really deal with it, and the sight of her pupil’s little brown hand on the rough parapet of the torrino brought her back to the present. All this was no good to Marietta. At last—

  “Things are quite different in England,” she said slowly. “But my Mother and I—that is the same thing; at least it could be, perhaps, with you and your Mother. I feel—oh well, with her one is always perfectly safe. She would never stop loving one. But because of that, some things are difficult.” She paused, and then said, in a burst of confidence—“I have not told her about this. It would have hurt her too terribly. And the old Marchesa said I should not; that made me glad. But I feel with her—well, that I can pull and pull on her love, and it will never break.”

  Marietta took this in slowly, looking in front of her.

  “That is beautiful—and happy,” she said at last. “That is what I should like. With Bonne-Mama, you know, I feel something of that too. Only she is so indulgent to me— almost too much. But with Mama—I am not sure. She is somehow further away. She must love me, I suppose—but I am little, and not pretty; I think beautiful Mothers are just a little vexed, general
ly, to have daughters who are not! Mama would have liked me more if I had been something of a beauty.”

  This quiet simple statement moved Almina almost unbearably. Her own observation entirely bore out its truth. And once again the new insight and frankness that her own pain had given her spoke from her mouth.

  “Marietta, I believe you could do something to alter that,” she said. “You know you are very—” she cast about for a word—“You walk very much by yourself,” she said, quoting her contemporary Kipling; “you do not open out much to people, not even to your Mother. I think perhaps if you tried, you could get nearer to her; if you”—she pushed up her hair with both hands and wrinkled her soft brows—“if you let her see that you wanted to be. I may be wrong, but I think this.” As she spoke she was trying to imagine what her own Mother would have made of a daughter who at intervals appeared, dropped a curtsey, proffered a docile cheek for a kiss, answered any question that was asked her, and then slipped away to stare at a view or to read a book. But then Mrs. Prestwich always had time to talk to even the plainest of her daughters. “She might really like it very much, if you did,” she ended rather lamely.

  At that very moment, in the Marchesa Suzy’s room, up in the house, the same subject was under discussion. Hardly that, perhaps; rather La Vecchia was speaking, and Suzy listening. The old lady had planned her day carefully. The reception was to be at five o’clock, and she must take a good rest after luncheon; the late morning was always her own best time, and in these days of convalescence it was also Suzy’s— Suzy, she considered, was now strong enough to be talked to seriously, and the birthday was a good occasion on which to make an impression on a difficult point. So while Miss Prestwich and Marietta were in the torrino, the old woman made her stiff slow resolute way to her daughter-in-law’s room, and sat down by the bed, where Suzy lay, slightly propped up now on lace-fringed pillows, the gamgee jacket which she still wore concealed by white crêpe-de-chine and swansdown, pearls on her neck, and her short curls arranged with some attempt at art. She was much thinner, and with the loss of flesh lines had become apparent in her face and neck; but her eyes in their shadowed orbits were as beautiful as ever, with that peculiar tender look that comes after illness, and her whole appearance had a fragile delicacy which conveyed something of the old charm; her voice, when she greeted her Mother-in-law, had the caressing quality it had always had. The loving warmth of the greetings which passed between the two women disguised itself presently in little playful sentences.