Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  She was exceedingly pretty in a sort of nondescript dress, between a tea-gown and something else; for though it was adorned with ribbons and laces, after the manner of tea-gowns, it was short-skirted when she stood up. In fact, it was ‘a little creation’ of her own, as her dressmaker would have said, thereby disclaiming all responsibility for its eccentricity. But it was distinctly becoming, and Miss Lizzie knew it.

  There is a great difference, morally, between being vain and being æsthetically aware of one’s advantages and good points. Vanity is even more blind than love, but there is something really and healthily artistic in judicious and successful self-adornment. Vanity paints its eyes, and rouges its cheeks, and dyes its hair, and laces its waist till its ribs crack. Good taste cuts its clothes according to its figure and its age, instead of pinching its body to fit its clothes. Vanity is full of affectation; good taste presents the best it has to view, so far as it can, and hides what is less good, without attempting to distort it, because what is not good cannot be made to look good, by torture, to eyes that understand. The vain woman interprets the statement that she is clay, in a literal sense, and tries to violently model her clay into the Venus of her dreams. The woman of taste accepts the fact that she is not a goddess and makes the best of her mortality as she has received it.

  Miss Slayback was very pretty, and even Tebaldo Pagliuca admitted the fact, though he was not in the least in love with her. She smiled and looked ten times prettier than before, as he entered the room.

  ‘My aunt is supposed to be out,’ she said, as he sat down. ‘But she is in the next room. So it is quite proper.’

  She laughed a little at her own speech, for she was still amused by European ideas of propriety, and she would have been surprised if anyone had been shocked by her receiving Tebaldo alone, when Mrs. Slayback was really asleep in the next room, during the heat of the afternoon. Tebaldo smiled courteously, leaned back a little in his small, low armchair, and fixed his eyes upon her face in silence. His expression might have deceived an older and a wiser woman.

  ‘I am very glad to find you alone,’ he said softly, after an emphatic pause of admiration. ‘Your aunt is one of the most charming women in the world, of course, but—’

  ‘But she is not always necessary,’ interrupted Miss Slayback. ‘Do you want to see my new embroidery? I bought it this morning—’

  ‘No. I do not care about your embroideries. I came to see you, not vestments.’

  ‘It is not a vestment. It is an altar cloth—’

  ‘It is not you, at all events,’ said Tebaldo, fixing his eyes upon her again. ‘I want you and only you — to-day, to-morrow, and for ever.’ His voice was well modulated.

  Miss Lizzie looked down, thoughtfully, but she did not blush. Tebaldo leaned forward a little, gazing earnestly into her face. But she looked down and said nothing, for she wished him to say more. It was pleasant to hear, and though her eyes were bent upon the carpet, she could really see his face quite distinctly.

  ‘I think you see and understand that I love you devotedly,’ he said in soft tones.

  It was not easy for him, with his ideas, to make the statement in cold blood, so to say. But that was evidently what she expected, and he did his best.

  ‘You must have seen it,’ he continued. ‘You must have understood it. I have tried to express it to you with the most profound respect, with that respect which I have felt for you from the first, and shall always feel, and wish to feel, for my wife.’

  Possibly Miss Lizzie, not being a Latin, would have been willing to hear less about respect and more about love. But he managed to make his tone convey something of that also. She looked up, slowly raising her long black lashes, till her dark blue eyes met his.

  ‘You know,’ she said, with an odd mixture of gentleness and wilfulness, ‘if I marry you, you must always let me do exactly as I please.’

  Tebaldo had known her long enough to be past the stage in which she could surprise him. The conception of American life which he had formed from her conversation was somewhat fantastic.

  ‘You would not be so frank if you meant to misuse your liberty,’ he answered wisely.

  ‘Do not be so sure!’ laughed Miss Lizzie, gaily.

  But Tebaldo wanted a more binding reply to his proposal.

  ‘Please do not laugh,’ he said. ‘Your answer — your consent will transport me to paradise.’

  ‘I hope not,’ answered the girl, still laughing a little. ‘I prefer you on earth, if I am to marry you.’

  ‘You are adorable!’ exclaimed Tebaldo, understanding that he must accept her jesting humour.

  ‘Yes? Am I?’ She smiled.

  ‘But you see that I adore you, worship you — love you! Everyone does—’

  ‘I do not want everyone—’

  ‘But me? That is the question. Do you—’

  ‘Oh yes! I want you,’ she answered, interrupting him. ‘Please let me think a moment. I am making up my mind.’

  Thereupon Miss Lizzie got up from her seat. Tebaldo rose also, wondering what she might be going to do to help her mind in making itself up. He rather expected that she meant to go into the next room to consult her aunt before giving her final answer. But she had no intention of doing that. She went to the window, and looked through the slats of the closed blinds, into the hot glare outside. Tebaldo remained standing close to the chair in which he had been sitting. As has been said, she could no longer surprise him, but he watched the ways and manners of the American young girl with interest, even while he grew nervous as he thought of the magnitude of the stake he hoped to win.

  Miss Lizzie stayed some time at the window, without moving. When she suddenly turned back into the room, and came straight up to Tebaldo, her face was a little paler than usual; but he could not see it, for the light was behind her. Her manner had quite changed now, and she spoke very gravely.

  ‘I have not known you very long, and you are asking me to put my whole life in your hands,’ she said. ‘I like you very much. I care for you so much that I am going to trust you, though I know you so little. I am going to say yes.’

  She laid her hands in his trustfully, and looked up into his face. His lids half veiled his eyes, for the triumph in his look was not the triumph of love, and he knew it. No sane man is without some good impulse, be he ever so bad.

  ‘I thank you with all my heart,’ he said, wisely choosing simple words now; and he pressed her hands gently. ‘I shall try to make you happy,’ he added.

  It all seemed very strange to her. Possibly something warned her even then that he was very false, more false than she could have understood. She had expected, shyly and with a little not quite unpleasant trepidation, that he would suddenly catch her in his arms and kiss her a score of times, quickly, as no one had ever kissed her. Yet there he stood, quite calm, just pressing the tips of her fingers, as though he were afraid of hurting her, and saying that he meant to make her happy. She was disappointed, though she would not have admitted that she was.

  She little guessed that the bad man had just then chanced to feel one of the few good impulses that ever disturbed him. At that moment it would have seemed considerably worse to him to act as she really expected that he would than it would have seemed to cut Francesco’s throat in his sleep. Explain those things who can. There is good in human nature, even at its worst; and it comes to the surface unexpectedly. Francesco, whose character was on the whole far less evil and malevolent, would have had no such scruple. To him a woman was a woman, and nothing more. But Tebaldo either loved or did not love, and the woman he did not love was not a woman at all in his eyes. And since in this case she chanced to be an innocent girl, his manliness — for he was manly and physically brave — revolted at the idea of offending her innocence.

  An old-fashioned theologian might say that a man who has no good in him is not properly fit to be damned. Such a man would have no free-will, and could not, therefore, logically be punished for anything he did. That was not Tebaldo Pagl
iuca’s case, at all events.

  Miss Lizzie stood still a moment, looking up to his face, after he had spoken; then she drew away her hands, and sat down again, feeling rather shy, for the first time since she had been a child. It seemed strange that it should all be over, and that she was to be married. Tebaldo began a little speech.

  ‘You have made me very happy,’ he said; and he formed a number of fairly well-turned phrases, in which to express his satisfaction, which was genuine, and his affection, which was not.

  She did not hear him, for her own thoughts seemed louder than his smoothly-spoken words. She was happy, and yet she was uncomfortable, in an undefined way, and did not know what was the matter. He did not seem to expect any response just then, and she let him talk on. Then she was aware that he was repeating a question.

  ‘May I announce our engagement?’ he was asking, for the second time.

  ‘Of course!’ she exclaimed, suddenly realising the sense of his words. ‘It is not a thing to be concealed. I will tell my aunt at once. You must come and see her this evening — no, we are going somewhere — I forget where! Come to-morrow, please.’

  ‘And when — ?’ He purposely left the sentence incomplete, filling the question with one of the long looks he had employed so often, with such success.

  ‘When what? Oh! You mean, when shall we be married? Let me see. It is May now. I shall have to go to Paris, of course. You will come, will you not?’

  ‘Could we not be married first, and go to Paris afterwards?’ enquired Tebaldo.

  But Miss Lizzie had no intention of being hurried to the altar without having got the full amount of enjoyment out of buying beautiful clothes, and Tebaldo was obliged to content himself with a promise that the wedding should take place early in the autumn. She wished to be married in Rome by an archbishop, if not by a cardinal. Tebaldo agreed to the whole college of cardinals, if necessary.

  When he went away, he walked more slowly. The sun was very low, and the air was growing cooler. He sauntered down towards the Corso, well pleased with his own prospects and thinking out the details of his future with intense satisfaction. Tebaldo was no spendthrift fool to waste his wife’s fortune on absurd frivolities, or to gamble it away in mad speculations. He meant to build up the Corleone once more, and make his family far greater than it had ever been. He did not know exactly how rich Miss Slayback was, but his guessing was, if anything, under the truth, and he had seen enough of her to know that she desired to be a personage, and was attracted by the idea of rank. He knew that she and her aunt had taken pains to enquire into the validity of his titles. He smiled when he remembered how cheaply he had held them in the old days at Camaldoli, when he would have sold his birthright for a new rifle, and a title or two for a supply of ammunition; and he admired in himself the transformation from the rough country gentleman, hardly one step above the tenant farmer of the Sicilian hills, to the fashionable young nobleman, engaged to be married to a great heiress, and already on the point of restoring to his family all its ancient magnificence.

  He walked the length of the Corso and back before he went home. He had hardly entered his room when there was a light knock at the door. Vittoria entered, looking pale and frightened.

  ‘What was the matter between you and Francesco?’ she asked as soon as she had shut the door behind her.

  ‘The matter?’ Tebaldo looked at her curiously, wondering whether she knew anything about Aliandra Basili. ‘We quarrelled, as usual,’ he said briefly.

  ‘It must have been worse than usual,’ said Vittoria, in a low voice. ‘He is gone.’

  ‘Gone? Where? Gone out to dinner?’ Tebaldo affected to laugh carelessly.

  ‘No. I think he is gone to Sicily,’ answered the young girl.

  Tebaldo uttered an exclamation of surprise, and his expression changed as he looked at his sister.

  ‘Yes,’ she continued. ‘He made a terrible scene with me and our mother — not exactly a scene, perhaps — it was all about you. He said that he was going, that he could not live in the house any longer, that he should never come back again. He said—’ she hesitated.

  ‘What more did he say?’

  ‘He was half mad, I think. He said it was better to be an outlaw than live under such a brother as you, and that he would pay you for what you had done to him in the way you least expected.’

  ‘What makes you think that he is gone to Sicily?’ asked Tebaldo, very quietly, while his lids drooped at the corners.

  ‘He looked for the trains in the newspaper, and I heard him say ‘Reggio’ and ‘Messina.’ We tried to quiet him — we did what we could. But he packed a quantity of things in a hurry, and went off in a cab, looking at his watch, and saying that he had barely time. Mother fell into one of those terrible fits of crying that she has sometimes, and she is ill again. I thought it best to tell you.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Tebaldo, thoughtfully. ‘And now that you have told me, please go away, for I must dress.’

  She was already turning, for she was used to his peremptory ways, but he stopped her.

  ‘I may as well tell you, Vittoria,’ he said; ‘I am engaged to be married to your friend Miss Slayback. I hope that, as the marriage will be so advantageous to our family, you will not criticise me to her too much. I am not quite so bad as you sometimes think.’

  Vittoria looked at him in silence for three or four seconds before she spoke.

  ‘I shall say nothing to injure you with her,’ she said slowly, and at once left the room.

  CHAPTER XXV

  ALIANDRA WAS RECEIVED in Randazzo with that sort of ovation which only Italians accord to a successful artist; and her father’s house was filled for a whole day with the respectable townsmen and their wives and daughters, who came to greet her and congratulate her. For the newspapers had informed them of her successes in Rome, and the Sicilian papers had exaggerated the original reports tenfold. The mayor and his wife, the municipal officers, the grey-haired lieutenant of carabineers with his pretty daughter, the rector, the curate, the young emigration agent of the big steamship company with his betrothed bride and her mother, the principal shopkeeper with his wife and children, the innkeeper — in short, all that represented the highest fashion in Randazzo, including Don Tolomeo Bellini, the most important tenant farmer on the great Fornasco estate as well as a small freeholder, whose ancestors had been privileged to bear arms, and who, therefore, ranked as a gentleman and stamped the cheeses from his dairy with a little five-pointed coronet. Basili had formerly hoped to get him for a son-in-law, and he would have been considered a very good match for the notary’s daughter.

  All Randazzo talked of the singer’s return, and the poor people crowded the street to get a look at her. The mayor said she was an honour to the province and to Sicily, and the rector, who had baptized her, expressed his hope that she might be always as good as she was famous, for he distrusted the name of art, but wished the girl well for her father’s sake and her own.

  Don Atanasio, the apothecary of Santa Vittoria, tried to persuade his daughter to go with him down to Randazzo and pay Aliandra a visit.

  ‘It will divert you a little from your sorrow, my daughter,’ he said, shaking his head.

  Concetta’s dark eyes turned slowly towards her father with a wondering look, as though she were amazed at his audacity and yet pitied his inability to measure her grief.

  ‘The dead need no amusements,’ she said, gravely. ‘They are very quiet. They wait.’

  ‘Eh — but the living,’ objected Don Atanasio. ‘We are alive, you know.’

  Concetta did not heed what he said.

  ‘The dead are very quiet. They wait for the Judgment and the Resurrection — the judgment of blood, and the resurrection of the innocent. Then they will be alive again.’

  Don Atanasio sighed, for his unhappy daughter was no longer like other women. She was of those simple beings for whom life has but one purpose after love has taken possession, and from whom the loved one, dying, take
s all purpose away for ever. The old man sighed and looked sideways at her, and a tear ran down his thin, straight nose, and fell upon the plaster he was spreading on the marble slab before him; but his daughter’s dark eyes were dry. She was sitting on a little low stool behind one end of the counter, where she could not be seen by any one who might chance to come into the shop. Her head was screened by the great old-fashioned marble mortar.

  Don Atanasio laid down the broad mixing-knife he was using, pushed back the black broadcloth cap which Concetta had once embroidered with a design of green leaves, wiped his spectacles, turned away to blow his nose with a large coloured handkerchief, and turned back again to take a long look at the girl. He laid his hand gently on her head, pressing her forehead back until she looked up into his face.

  ‘You wish to make me die also,’ he said slowly. ‘What have I done that you wish to make me die?’

  She looked at him very sadly, and then quickly got hold of his other hand and kissed it with a sort of devotion. She was very fond of him. He patted the back of her head affectionately.

  ‘In truth, my dear,’ he said gently, ‘if I see you always thus, I shall not live long, for I have only you in the world, and the rest does not matter. But it is not that, since I would die to make you happy. What should it be for me? I am old. I am of no use. They will have another apothecary in Santa Vittoria. That is nothing. My thoughts are for you.’

  ‘Do not think for me,’ answered the girl. ‘I sit here quietly. I do no harm. And then, when it is later, I go to see my dead one every day.’

  ‘But it is not good to do this always,’ objected Don Atanasio, coaxingly. ‘That is why I say come down with me to Randazzo to-morrow, and let us go and see the notary Basili, who has broken his leg, and his daughter, the great singer, who has come back from Rome to visit him. She is a good girl, and you can make a little conversation with her. It will be a diversion, a sober diversion, and the air will do you good, and the movement.’