Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  “I could not live,” she said. “I could not be a millstone, dragging you down, watching you as you killed yourself in working for me. It was to be one of us. It was better so.”

  In his agony he laid his head beside hers on the pillow.

  “Gloria — for Christ’s sake — don’t leave me—” The deep moan came from his tortured heart.

  “Bring — the child — Walter—” she said very faintly.

  Even in death she could not bear to be alone with him. He straightened himself, stood up, and saw the light fading in her eyes. Then, indeed, a shiver ran through her and shook her. Then the lids opened wide, and she cried out loudly.

  “Quick — I am going—”

  Rather than that she should not have what she wished, he tore himself away and wrenched the door open, forgetting that it was locked.

  “Bring the child!” he cried, into the face of old Nanna, who was standing there, and he pushed her towards the door of the other room with one hand, while he already turned back to Gloria.

  He started, for she was sitting up, with wide eyes and outstretched hands, gazing at the patch of sunlight on the floor. Dying, she saw the awful vision of her dream again, rising stiff and stark from the bricks to its upright horror between her and the light. Her hands pointed at it and shook, and her jaw dropped, but she was motionless as she sat.

  Nanna, sobbing, came in suddenly, holding up the little child straight before her, that it might see its mother before she was gone forever. The baby hands feebly beat its little sides, and it gasped for breath.

  Words came from Gloria’s open mouth, articulate, clear, but very far in sound.

  “An evil death on you and all your house!” the words said, as though spoken by another.

  The outstretched hands sank slowly, as the vision laid itself down before her, straight and corpse-like. The beautiful head fell back upon Griggs’s arm, and the eyes met his.

  “The last great, true note died away.” — Vol. II., .

  Nanna prayed aloud, holding up the child mechanically, and the small eyes were fixed, horrorstruck, upon the bed. A low cry trembled in the air. Stefanone, his hat in his hand, stood against the door, bowed a little, as though he were in church. The cry came again. Then there was a sort of struggle.

  In an instant Gloria was standing up on the bed to her full height. And the hot, still room rang with a burst of desperate, ear-breaking song, in majestic, passionate, ascending intervals.

  “Calpesta il mio cadavere, ma salva il Trovator!”

  The last great, true note died away. For one instant she stood up still, with outstretched hands, white, motionless. Then the flame in the dark eyes broke and went out, and Gloria fell down dead.

  “Maria Addolorata! Maria Addolorata!” Nanna screamed in deadly terror, as she heard the transcendent voice that one time, like a voice from the grave.

  She sank down, fainting upon the floor, and the little child rolled from her slackened arms upon the coarse bricks and lay on its face, moaning tremulously. No one heeded it.

  Stefanone, with instinctive horror of death, turned and went blindly down the steps, not knowing what he had seen, the death notes still ringing in his ears.

  On the bed, the man lay dumb upon the dead woman. Only the poor little child seemed to be alive, and clutched feebly at the coarse red bricks, and moaned and bruised its small face. It bore the slender inheritance of fatal life, the inheritance of vows broken and of faith outraged, and with it, perhaps, the implanted seed of a lifelong terror, not remembered, but felt throughout life, as real and as deadly as an inheritance of mortal disease. Better, perhaps, if death had taken it, too, to the lonely grave of the outcast and suicide woman, among the rocks, out of earshot of humanity. Death makes strange oversights and leaves strange gleanings for life, when he has reaped his field and housed his harvest.

  They would not give Gloria Christian burial, for it was known throughout Subiaco that she had poisoned herself, and those were still the old days, when the Church’s rules were the law of the people.

  Paul Griggs took the body of the woman he had loved, and loved beyond death, and he laid her in a deep grave in a hollow of the hillside. Such words as he had to speak to those who helped him, he spoke quietly, and none could say that they had seen the still face moved by sorrow. But as they watched him, a human sort of fear took hold of them, at his great quiet, and they knew that his grief was beyond anything which could be shown or understood. It was night, and they filled the grave after he had thrown earth into it with his hands. He sent them away, and they left him alone with the dead, leaving also one of their lanterns upon a stone near by.

  All that night he lay on the grave, dumb. Then, when the dawn came upon him, he kissed the loose earth and stones, and got upon his feet and went slowly down the hillside to the town beyond the torrent. He went into the house noiselessly, and lay down upon the bed on which she had died. And so he did for two nights and two days. On the third, a great carriage came from Rome, bringing twelve men, singers of the Sistine Chapel and of the choir of Saint Peter’s and of Saint John Lateran, twelve men having very beautiful voices, as sweet as any in the world. He had sent for them when he had been told that she could not have Christian burial.

  They were talking and laughing together when they came, but when they saw his face they grew very quiet, and followed him in silence where he led them. Two little boys followed them, too, wondering what was to happen, and what the thirteen men were going to do, all dressed in black, walking so steadily together.

  When they all came to the hollow in the hillside, they saw a mound, as of a grave, amidst the stones, and on it there lay a cross of black wood. The singers looked at one another in silence, and they understood that whoever lay in the grave had been refused a place in the churchyard, for some great sin. But they said nothing. The man who led them stood still at the head of the cross and took off his hat, and looked at his twelve companions, who uncovered their heads. They had sheets of written music with them, and they passed them quietly about from one to another and looked towards one who was their leader.

  Overhead, the summer sky was pale, and there were twin mountains of great clouds in the northwest, hiding the sun, and in the southeast, whence the parching wind was blowing in fierce gusts. It blew the dry dust from the clods of earth on the grave, and the dust settled on the black clothes of the men as they stood near.

  The voices struck the first chord softly together, and the music for the dead went up to heaven, and was borne far across the torrent to the distance in the arms of the hot wind. And one voice climbed above the others, sweet and clear, as though to reach heaven itself; and another sank deep and true and soft in the full close of the stave, as though it would touch and comfort the heart that was quite still at last in the deep earth.

  Then one who was young stood a little before the rest, a strong, pale singer, with an angel’s voice. And he sang alone to the sky and the dusty rocks and the solemn grave. He sang the ‘Cujus animam gementem pertransivit gladius’ of the Stabat Mater, as none had sung it before him, nor perhaps has ever sung it since that day — he alone, without other music.

  They came also to the words ‘Fac ut animæ donetur Paradisi gloria,’ and the word was a name to him who listened silently in their midst.

  Besides these they sang also a ‘Miserere,’ and last of all, ‘Requiem eternam dona eis.’

  Then there was silence, and they looked at the still face, as though asking what they should do. The mysterious eyes met theirs with shadows. The pale head bent itself in thanks, twice or thrice, but there were no words.

  So they turned and left him there on the hillside, and went back to the town, awestruck by the vastness of the man’s sorrow. And afterwards, for many years, when any of them heard of a great grief, he shook his head and said that he and those who had sung with him over a lonely grave in the mountains, alone knew what a man could feel and yet live.

  And Paul Griggs lived through those days, and
is still alive. His grief could not spend itself, but his stern strength took hold of life again, and he took the child with him and went back to Rome, to work for it from that time forward, and to shield it from evil if he could, and to bring it up to be a man, ignorant of what had happened in Subiaco in those summer days, ignorant of the tie that made it his, to be a man free from the burden of past fates and sins and broken vows and trampled faith, and of the death his dead mother had died, having a clean name of his own, with which there could be no memories of misery and fear and horror.

  He wrote a few short words to Angus Dalrymple, now Lord Redin at last, to tell him the truth as far as he knew it. The hand that had laboured so bravely for Gloria could hardly trace the words that told of her death.

  Then, when the summer heat was passed, he took little Walter Crowdie with him, hiring an Englishwoman to tend the child, and he crossed the ocean and gave it to certain kinsfolk of his in America, telling them that it was the child of one who had been very dear to him, that he had taken it as his own, and would provide for it and take it back when it should be older. And so he did, and little Walter Crowdie grew up with an angel’s voice, and other gifts which made him famous in his day. But many things happened before that time came.

  He could do no better than that. For a time he strove to earn money with his pen in his own country. But the land was still trembling from the convulsion of a great war, and there were many before him, and he was little known. After a year had passed, he saw that he could not then succeed, and very heavy at heart he set his face eastward again, to toil at his old calling as a correspondent for a great London paper, to earn bread for himself and for the one living being that he loved.

  PART III. DONNA FRANCESCA CAMPODONICO.

  CHAPTER XLI.

  NOT LONG AFTER this Dalrymple returned to Rome, after an absence of several years. Family affairs had kept him in England and Scotland during his daughter’s married life with Reanda; and after she had left the latter, it was natural that he should not wish to be in the same city with her, considering the view he took of her actions. Then, after he had learned from Griggs’s brief note that she was dead, he felt that he could not return at once, hard and unforgiving as he was. But at last the power that attracted him was too strong to be resisted any longer, and he yielded to it and came back.

  He took up his abode in a hotel in the Piazza di Spagna, not far from his old lodgings. Long as he had lived in Rome, he was a foreigner there and liked the foreigners’ quarter of the city. He intended once more to get a lodging and a servant, and to live in his morose solitude as of old, but on his first arrival he naturally went to the hotel. He did not know whether Griggs were in Rome. Reanda was alive, and living at the Palazzetto Borgia; for the two had exchanged letters twice a year, written in the constrained tone of mutual civility which suited the circumstances in which they were placed towards each other.

  In Dalrymple’s opinion, Reanda had been to blame to a certain extent, in having maintained his intimacy with Francesca when he was aware that it displeased his wife. At the same time, the burden of the fault was undoubtedly the woman’s, and her father felt in a measure responsible for it. Whether he felt much more than that it would be hard to say. His gloomy nature had spent itself in secret sorrow for his wife, with a faithfulness of grief which might well atone for many shortcomings. It is certain that he was not in any way outwardly affected by the news of Gloria’s death. He had never loved her, she had disgraced him, and now she was dead. There was nothing more to be said about it.

  He was not altogether indifferent to the inheritance of title and fortune which had fallen to him in his advanced middle age. But if either influenced his character, the result was rather an increased tendency to live his own life in scorn and defiance of society, for it made him conscious that he should find even less opposition to his eccentricities than in former days, when he had been relatively a poor man without any especial claim to consideration.

  Two or three days after he had arrived in Rome, he went to the Palazzetto Borgia and sent in his card, asking to see Francesca Campodonico. In order that she might know who he was, he wrote his name in pencil, as she would probably not have recognized him as Lord Redin. In this he was mistaken, for Reanda, who had heard the news, had told her of it. She received him in the drawing-room. She looked very ill, he thought, and was much thinner than in former times, but her manner was not changed. They talked upon indifferent subjects, and there was a constraint between them. Dalrymple broke through it roughly at last.

  “Did you ever see my daughter after she left her husband?” he asked, as though he were inquiring about a mere acquaintance.

  Francesca started a little.

  “No,” she answered. “It would not have been easy.”

  She remembered her interview with Griggs, but resolved not to speak of it. She would have changed the subject abruptly if he had given her time.

  “It certainly was not to be expected that you should,” said Lord Redin, thoughtfully. “When a woman chooses to break with society, she knows perfectly well what she is doing, and one may as well leave her to herself.”

  Francesca was shocked by the cynicism of the speech. The colour rose faintly in her cheeks.

  “She was your daughter,” she said, reproachfully. “Since she is dead, you should speak less cruelly of her.”

  “I did not speak cruelly. I merely stated a fact. She disgraced herself and me, and her husband. The circumstance that she is dead does not change the case, so far as I can see.”

  “Do you know how she died?” asked Francesca, moved to righteous anger, and willing to pain him if she could.

  He looked up suddenly, and bent his shaggy brows.

  “No,” he answered. “That man Griggs wrote me that she had died suddenly. That was all I heard.”

  “She did not die a natural death.”

  “Indeed?”

  “She poisoned herself. She could not bear the life. It was very dreadful.” Francesca’s voice sank to a low tone.

  Lord Redin was silent for a few moments, and his bony face had a grim look. Perhaps something in the dead woman’s last act appealed to him, as nothing in her life had done.

  “Tell me, please. I should like to know. After all, she was my daughter.”

  “Yes,” said Francesca, gravely. “She was your daughter. She was very unhappy with Paul Griggs, and she found out very soon that she had made a dreadful mistake. She loved her husband, after all.”

  “Like a woman!” interjected Lord Redin, half unconsciously.

  Francesca paid no attention to the remark, except, perhaps, that she raised her eyebrows a little.

  “They went out to spend the summer at Subiaco—”

  “At Subiaco?” Dalrymple’s steely blue eyes fixed themselves in a look of extreme attention.

  “Yes, during the heat. They lodged in the house of a man called Stefanone — a wine-seller — a very respectable place.”

  Lord Redin had started nervously at the name, but he recovered himself.

  “Very respectable,” he said, in an odd tone.

  “You know the house?” asked Francesca, in surprise.

  “Very well indeed. I was there nearly five and twenty years ago. I supposed that Stefanone was dead by this time.”

  “No. He and his wife are alive, and take lodgers.”

  “Excuse me, but how do you know all this?” asked Lord Redin, with sudden curiosity.

  “I have been there,” answered Francesca. “I have often been to the convent. You know that one of our family is generally abbess. A Cardinal Braccio was archbishop, too, a good many years ago. Casa Braccio owns a good deal of property there.”

  “Yes. I know that you are of the family.”

  “My name was Francesca Braccio,” said Francesca, quietly. “Of course I have always known Subiaco, and every one there knows Stefanone, and the story of his daughter who ran away with an Englishman many years ago, and never was heard of again.”
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br />   Lord Redin grew a trifle paler.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Does every one know that story?”

  There was something so constrained in his tone that Francesca looked at him curiously.

  “Yes — in Subiaco,” she answered. “But Gloria—” she lingered a little sadly on the name— “Gloria wrote letters to her husband from there and begged him to go and see her.”

  “He could hardly be expected to do that,” said Lord Redin, his hard tone returning. “Did you advise him to go?”

  “He consulted me,” answered Francesca, rather coldly. “I told him to follow his own impulse. He did not go. He did not believe that she was sincere.”

  “I do not blame him. When a woman has done that sort of thing, there is no reason for believing her.”

  “He should have gone. I should have influenced him, I think, and I did wrong. She wrote him one more letter and then killed herself. She suffered horribly and only died two days afterwards. Shall I tell you more?”

  “If there is more to tell,” said Lord Redin, less hardly.

  “There is not much. I went out there last year. They had refused her Christian burial. Paul Griggs bought a piece of land amongst the rock, on the other side of the torrent, and buried her there. It is surrounded by a wall, and there is a plain slab without a name. There are flowers. He pays Stefanone to have it cared for. They told me all they knew — it is too terrible. She died singing — she was out of her mind. It must have been dreadful. Old Nanna, Stefanone’s wife, was in the room, and fainted with terror. It seems that poor Gloria, oddly enough, had an extraordinary resemblance to that unfortunate nun of our family who was burned to death in the convent, and whom Nanna had often seen. She sang like her, too — at the last minute Nanna thought she saw poor sister Maria Addolorata standing up dead and singing. It was rather strange.”