“We’re a pack of fools!” he exclaimed, suddenly. “The will isn’t signed.”
Alexander Junior uttered a loud exclamation, sprang to his feet, and snatched the will from the lawyer’s hand so roughly as to brush the gold-rimmed glasses from his thin nose, on which they had pinched their unsteady hold, and they fell to the ground.
“Eh? What?” he asked, very much disturbed by such rude interruption.
Alexander had turned to the end, and had seen that it was a blank, without signatures either of testator or witnesses.
“Thank God!” he exclaimed, fervently, as he dropped back into his chair. “That almost killed me,” he added in a low voice, regardless of the others.
But no one paid much attention to him. Hamilton Bright remained impassive. Each of the others uttered an exclamation, or breathed a sigh of relief. For some minutes afterwards there was a dead silence.
Mr. Allen was fumbling on the floor for his gold-rimmed glasses, still very much confused. They had managed to get under the low chair in which he sat, and which had a long fringe on it, reaching almost to the ground, so that he took some time in finding them.
“Of course he would never have signed such a thing!” said Hamilton Bright, with emphasis. “He had too much sense.”
“I should think so!” exclaimed Mrs. Lauderdale. “The only thing I can’t understand is how it ever was kept and marked ‘Will.’”
“Uncle Robert once told me that he had often made sketches of wills leaving all his money in trust to the poor,” said Katharine. “He never meant to sign one, though. This must be one of them — of course — it can’t be anything else!”
“His secretary probably put it away, supposing he wanted to keep it,” said Ralston, from behind Mr. Allen. “Then he forgot all about it, and so it turned up among the papers. It’s simple enough.”
“Oh, quite simple!” assented Alexander Junior, with a half-hysterical laugh.
Mrs. Ralston was watching the lawyer as he felt for his glasses on the carpet. He paused, wiped his brow — for it was a warm afternoon, and he had been nervously excited himself in reading the document. Then he continued his search.
“There’s a bit of paper there on the floor, beside your hand,” said Mrs. Ralston. “I saw it drop when you opened the envelope. Perhaps it’s something more important.”
Mr. Allen recovered his glasses at that moment, and with the other hand took up the little folded sheet. With the utmost care and precision he went through the same preparations for reading which had been indispensable on the first occasion.
“Let us see, let us see,” he said. “This is something. ‘I hereby certify,’ — oh, an old marriage certificate of yours, Mrs. Ralston. John Ralston and Katharine Lauderdale — married — dear me! I don’t understand! This year, too! This is very strange.”
Again every one present started, but with very different expressions. Hamilton Bright grew slowly red. There was a short pause. Then John Ralston rose to his feet and bent over Mr. Allen’s shoulder.
“It’s our certificate,” he said, quietly. “Katharine’s and mine. We were married last winter.”
And he took the paper from the hands of the wondering lawyer, and held it in his own.
“Katharine!” cried Mrs. Lauderdale, when she had realized the meaning of Ralston’s words.
“Katharine!” cried Alexander Junior, almost at the same moment.
At any other time some one of all those present might have smiled at the difference in intonation between Mrs. Lauderdale’s cry of unmixed astonishment, and her husband’s deprecatory but forgiving utterance of his daughter’s name. Both conveyed, in widely differing ways, as much as whole phrases could have told, namely, that Mrs. Lauderdale was sincerely pleased, in spite of all her former opposition to the marriage, and that her husband, while he would much rather have his daughter married to Ralston secretly than not at all, felt that his dignity and parental authority had been outraged, and that he would be glad to have an apology, if any were to be had, of which condition his voice also expressed a doubt.
“I’ll tell you all about it, from the beginning,” said John Ralston.
He told the story in as few words as he could, omitting, as he had done in telling his mother, to give Katharine her full share of responsibility. She bent far forward in her seat while he was speaking, and leaned upon the back of Mr. Allen’s chair, never taking her eyes from her husband’s face. More than once her eyes brightened with a sort of affectionate indignation, and her lips parted as though she would speak. But she did not interrupt him. When he had finished he stood still in his place, looking at his father-in-law, and still holding the certificate of his marriage in his hand.
Alexander Junior would have found it hard to be angry just at that moment. He had his desire. In the course of five minutes he had been cast down from a position of enormous wealth and power, since there could be no question but that the half of the great estate would really be in his control if there were no will; he had been plunged into such a depth of despair as only the real miser can understand when his hundreds or his millions, as the case may be, are swept out of sight and out of reach by a breath; and he had been restored to the pinnacle of happiness again, almost before there had been time to make his suffering seem more than the passing vision of a hideous dream. Moreover, the marriage being already accomplished and a matter of fact, made it a positive certainty that all that part of the fortune which belonged to the Ralstons would return to his own grandchildren. His outraged sense of parental importance was virtuously, but silently, indignant, and he admitted that, on the whole, the causes of satisfaction outnumbered any reasons there might be for displeasure. Something, however, must be done to propitiate the prejudices of the world, which had much force with him.
“I think we’d better all go into the country as soon as possible,” he observed, thinking aloud.
But no one heard him, for Katharine had risen and come forward and stood beside her husband, slipping her arm through his, and invisibly pressing him to her — unconsciously, too, perhaps — whenever she wished to emphasize a word in what she said.
“I want to say something,” she began, raising her voice. “It’s all my fault, you know. I did it. I persuaded Jack one evening, here in this very room — and it was awfully hard to persuade him, I assure you! He didn’t like it in the least. He said it wasn’t a perfectly fair and honest thing to do. But I made him see it differently. I’m not sure that I was right. You see, we should have been married, anyway, as it’s turned out, because papa’s been so nice about it in the end. That’s all I wanted to say.”
There was probably no malice in her diplomatic allusion to her father. The only person who smiled at it was Mrs. Ralston.
“Except,” added Katharine, by an afterthought, “that the reason why we did it was because we wanted to be sure of getting each other in the end.”
“Well,” said Hamilton Bright, who was very red, “I suppose the next thing to do is to congratulate you, isn’t it? Here goes. Jack, I’m sorry I slated secret marriages the other day. You see, one doesn’t always know.”
“No,” observed Mrs. Lauderdale, who had her arms around her daughter’s neck. “One doesn’t — as Ham says.”
“That’s all right, Ham,” said John Ralston. “I didn’t mind a bit.”
But Hamilton Bright minded very much, in his quiet way, for he had played a losing game of late, and the same hour had deprived him of all hope of marrying Katharine, faint as it had been since she had so definitely refused him, and of all prospect of ever getting a share of the Lauderdale fortune. But he was a very brave man, and better able than most of those present to bear such misfortunes as fell to his lot. As for marrying, he put it out of his thoughts; and so far as fortune was concerned, he was prosperous and successful in all that he undertook to do himself, unaided, which is, after all, the most satisfactory success a man can have in the long run. The right to say ‘I did it alone’ compensates for many fancied and real wrongs.
And that was something which Hamilton Bright had very often been able to say with truth. But his love for Katharine Lauderdale had been honest, enduring and generally silent. Never had he spoken to her of love until he had fancied that his friend John Ralston had no intention, nor she, either, of anything serious.
It was with the consent and approval of all her family that Katharine entered upon her married life at last, after having been secretly and in name the wedded wife of John Ralston for more than five months. The world thought it not extraordinary that there should be no public ceremony, considering the recent decease of Robert Lauderdale and the shockingly sudden death of Walter Crowdie. The Lauderdales, said the world, had shown good taste, for many reasons, in having a private wedding. Having always lived quietly, it would have been unbecoming in them to invite society to a marriage of royal splendour, when he who had left them their wealth had not been dead two months. On the other hand, the union of forty millions with twenty could hardly have been decently accomplished by means of two carriages from the livery stable and a man from the greengrocer’s. The world, therefore, said that the Lauderdales and the Ralstons had done perfectly right, a fact which pleased some members of the tribe and was indifferent to others. The only connections who were heard to complain at all were the three Miss Miners, whose old-maidenly souls delighted in weddings and found refreshment in funerals.
And the only person whom Katharine missed, and cared to miss, amongst all those who congratulated her was Paul Griggs. She did not see him, after they had met on the stairs of the house in Lafayette Place, for a long time. During the summer which followed the announcement of her marriage, she heard that he was in the East again — a vague term applied to Cairo, Constantinople and Calcutta. At all events, he was not in New York, but had taken his weary eyes and weather-beaten face to some remote region of the earth, and gave no further sign of life for some time, though a book which he had written before Crowdie’s death appeared soon after his departure. Katharine received one letter from him during the summer — a rather formal letter of congratulation upon her marriage, and bearing a postmark in Cyrillic characters, though the stamp was not Russian, but one she had never seen.
Here ends an act of Katharine’s life-comedy, and the chronicler leaves her with her beauty, her virtues and her imperfections to the judgment of that one reader, if perchance there be even one, who has had the patience to follow her so far, with little entertainment and no advantage to himself. And to that one reader — an ideal creation of the chronicler’s mind, having no foundation in his experience of humanity — the said chronicler makes apology for all that has been amiss in the telling of the events recorded, conscious that a better man could have done it better, and that better men are plentiful, but stout in asserting that the events were not, in themselves and in reality, without interest, however poorly they have been narrated.
Moral, there is none, nor purpose, save to please; and if any one be pleased, the writer has his reward. But besides moral and purpose in things done with ink and paper, there is consequence to be considered, or at least to be taken into account. In real life we take more thought of that than of anything else; for, consciously or unconsciously, man hardly performs any action, however insignificant, without intention — and intention is the hope of consequence.
All that happened to Katharine Lauderdale, and all that she caused to happen by her own will, had an effect upon her existence afterwards. She was entering upon married life with a much more varied experience than most young women of her age. She had been brought into direct and close relation with people influenced by some of the strongest passions that can rouse the heart. She had been hated by those who had loved her, and for little or no fault of hers. She had seen envy standing in the high place of a mother’s love, and she had seen the friendship of her girlhood destroyed by unreasoning jealousy. Above all, she had known the base hardness and the revolting cruelty which the love of money could implant in an otherwise upright nature. The persons with whom she had to do were not of the kind to commit crimes, but in her view there was something worse, if possible, than crime in some of the things they had done.
So much for the evil by which she had passed. For the good, she had love, good love, pure love, honest love — the sort of love that may last a lifetime. And if love can weather life it need not fear the whirlpool of death, nor the quicksands of the uncertain shore beyond. It is life that kills love — not death.
Therefore, as the chronicler closes his book and offers it to his single long-suffering reader, he says that more remains to be told of Katharine and of the men and women among whom she lived; namely, the consequences of her girlhood in her married life.
THE END
Casa Braccio
CONTENTS
PART I. SISTER MARIA ADDOLORATA.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
PART II. GLORIA DALRYMPLE.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
PART III. DONNA FRANCESCA CAMPODONICO.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
THIS STORY, BEING MY TWENTY-FIFTH NOVEL,
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO
MY WIFE
Sorrento, 1895
PART I. SISTER MARIA ADDOLORATA.
CHAPTER I.
SUBIACO LIES BEYOND Tivoli, southeast from Rome, at the upper end of a wild gorge in the Samnite mountains. It is an archbishopric, and gives a title to a cardinal, which alone would make it a town of importance. It shares with Monte Cassino the honour of having been chosen by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica, his sister, as the site of a monastery and a convent; and in a cell in the rock a portrait of the holy man is still well preserved, which is believed, not without reason, to have been painted from life, although Saint Benedict died early in the fifth century. The town itself rises abruptly to a great height upon a mass of rock, almost conical in shape, crowned by the cardinal’s palace, and surrounded on three sides by rugged mountains. On the third, it looks down the rapidly widening valley in the direction of Vicovaro, near which the Licenza runs into the Anio, in the neighbourhood of Horace’s farm. It is a very ancient town, and in its general appearance it does not differ very much from many similar ones amongst the Italian mountains; but its position is exceptionally good, and its importance has been stamped upon it by the hands of those who have thought it worth holding since the days of ancient Rome. Of late it has, of course, acquired a certain modernness of aspect; it has planted acacia trees in its little piazza, and it has a gorgeously arrayed municipal band. But from a little distance one neither hears the band nor sees the trees, the grim mediæval fortifications frown upon the valley, and the time-stained dwellings, great and small, rise in rugged irregularity against the lighter brown of the ro
cky background and the green of scattered olive groves and chestnuts. Those features, at least, have not changed, and show no disposition to change during generations to come.
In the year 1844, modern civilization had not yet set in, and Subiaco was, within, what it still appears to be from without, a somewhat gloomy stronghold of the Middle Ages, rearing its battlements and towers in a shadowy gorge, above a mountain torrent, inhabited by primitive and passionate people, dominated by ecclesiastical institutions, and, though distinctly Roman, a couple of hundred years behind Rome itself in all matters ethic and æsthetic. It was still the scene of the Santacroce murder, which really decided Beatrice Cenci’s fate; it was still the gathering place of highwaymen and outlaws, whose activity found an admirable field through all the region of hill and plain between the Samnite range and the sea, while the almost inaccessible fortresses of the higher mountains, towards Trevi and the Serra di Sant’ Antonio, offered a safe refuge from the halfhearted pursuit of Pope Gregory’s lazy soldiers.
Something of what one may call the life-and-death earnestness of earlier times, when passion was motive and prejudice was law, survived at that time and even much later; the ferocity of practical love and hatred dominated the theory and practice of justice in the public life of the smaller towns, while the patriarchal system subjected the family in almost absolute servitude to its head.
There was nothing very surprising in the fact that the head of the house of Braccio should have obliged one of his daughters to take the veil in the Convent of Carmelite nuns, just within the gate of Subiaco, as his sister had taken it many years earlier. Indeed, it was customary in the family of the Princes of Gerano that one of the women should be a Carmelite, and it was a tradition not unattended with worldly advantages to the sisterhood, that the Braccio nun, whenever there was one, should be the abbess of that particular convent.
Maria Teresa Braccio had therefore yielded, though very unwillingly, to her father’s insistence, and having passed through her novitiate, had finally taken the veil as a Carmelite of Subiaco, in the year 1841, on the distinct understanding that when her aunt died she was to be abbess in the elder lady’s stead. The abbess herself was, indeed, in excellent health and not yet fifty years old, so that Maria Teresa — in religion Maria Addolorata — might have a long time to wait before she was promoted to an honour which she regarded as hereditary; but the prospect of such promotion was almost her only compensation for all she had left behind her, and she lived upon it and concentrated her character upon it, and practised the part she was to play, when she was quite sure that she was not observed.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 756