While he thus praised his friend, Tonelli was meditating a service, which when he asked it of Pennellini, had almost the effect to destroy their ancient amity. This was no less than the composition of those wedding-verses, without which, printed and exposed to view in all the shop-windows, no one in Venice feels himself adequately and truly married. Pennellini had never willingly made a verse in his life; and it was long before he understood Tonelli, when he urged the delicate request. Then in vain he protested, recalcitrated. It was all an offence to Tonelli’s morbid soul, already irritated by his friend’s obtuseness, and eager to turn even the reluctance of nature into insult. He took his refusal for a sign that he, too, deserted him; and must be called back, after bidding Pennellini adieu, to hear the only condition on which the accursed sonnet would be furnished, namely, that it should not be signed Pennellini, but An Affectionate Friend. Never was sonnet cost poet so great anguish as this: Pennellini went at it conscientiously as if it were a problem in mathematics; he refreshed his prosody, he turned over Carrer, he toiled a whole night, and in due time appeared as Tonelli’s affectionate friend in all the butchers’ and bakers’ windows. But it had been too much to ask of him, and for a while he felt the shock of Tonelli’s unreason and excess so much that there was a decided coolness between them.
This important particular arranged, little remained for Tonelli to do but to come to that open understanding with the Paronsina and her mother which he had long dreaded and avoided. He could not conceal from himself that his marriage was a kind of desertion of the two dear friends so dependent upon his singleness, and he considered the case of the Paronsina with a real remorse. If his meditated act sometimes appeared to him a gross inconsistency and a satire upon all his former life, he had still consoled himself with the truth of his passion, and had found love its own apology and comfort; but in its relation to these lonely women, his love itself had no fairer aspect than that of treason, and he shrank from owning it before them with a sense of guilt. Some wild dreams of reconciling his future with his past occasionally haunted him; but in his saner moments, he perceived their folly. Carlotta, he knew, was good and patient, but she was nevertheless a woman, and she would never consent that he should be to the Cenarotti all that he had been; these ladies also were very kind and reasonable, but they too were women, and incapable of accepting a less perfect devotion. Indeed, was not his proposed marriage too much like taking her only son from the signora and giving the Paronsina a stepmother? It was worse, and so the ladies of the notary’s family viewed it, cherishing a resentment that grew with Tonelli’s delay to deal frankly with them; while Carlotta, on her part, was wounded that these old friends should ignore his future wife so utterly. On both sides evil was stored up.
When Tonelli would still make a show of fidelity to the Paronsina and her mother, they accepted his awkward advances, the latter with a cold visage, the former with a sarcastic face and tongue. He had managed particularly ill with the Paronsina, who, having no romance of her own, would possibly have come to enjoy the autumnal poetry of his love if he had permitted. But when she first approached him on the subject of those rumors she had heard, and treated them with a natural derision, as involving the most absurd and preposterous ideas, he, instead of suffering her jests, and then turning her interest to his favor, resented them, and closed his heart and its secret against her. What could she do, thereafter, but feign to avoid the subject, and adroitly touch it with constant, invisible stings? Alas! it did not need that she should ever speak to Tonelli with the wicked intent she did; at this time he would have taken ill whatever most innocent thing she said. When friends are to be estranged, they do not require a cause. They have but to doubt one another, and no forced forbearance or kindness between them can do aught but confirm their alienation. This is on the whole fortunate, for in this manner neither feels to blame for the broken friendship, and each can declare with perfect truth that he did all he could to maintain it. Tonelli said to himself, “If the Paronsina had treated the affair properly at first!” and the Paronsina thought, “If he had told me frankly about it to begin with!” Both had a latent heartache over their trouble, and both a sense of loss the more bitter because it was of loss still unacknowledged.
As the day fixed for Tonelli’s wedding drew near, the rumor of it came to the Cenarotti from all their acquaintance. But when people spoke to them of it, as of something they must be fully and particularly informed of, the signora answered coldly, “It seems that we have not merited Tonelli’s confidence”; and the Paronsina received the gossip with an air of clearly affected surprise, and a “Davvero!” that at least discomfited the tale-bearers.
The consciousness of the unworthy part he was acting toward these ladies had come at last to poison the pleasure of Tonelli’s wooing, even in Carlotta’s presence; yet I suppose he would still have let his wedding-day come and go, and been married beyond hope of atonement, so loath was he to inflict upon himself and them the pain of an explanation, if one day, within a week of that time, the notary had not bade his clerk dine with him on the morrow. It was a holiday, and as Carlotta was at home, making ready for the marriage, Tonelli consented to take his place at the table from which he had been a long time absent. But it turned out such a frigid and melancholy banquet as never was known before. The old notary, to whom all things came dimly, finally missed the accustomed warmth of Tonelli’s fun, and said, with a little shiver, “Why, what ails you, Tonelli? You are as moody as a man in love.”
The notary had been told several times of Tonelli’s affair, but it was his characteristic not to remember any gossip later than that of ‘Forty-eight.
The Paronsina burst into a laugh full of the cruelty and insult of a woman’s long-smothered sense of injury. “Caro nonno,” she screamed into her grandfather’s dull ear, “he is really in despair how to support his happiness. He is shy, even of his old friends, — he has had so little experience. It is the first love of a young man. Bisogna compatire la gioventù, caro nonno.” And her tongue being finally loosed, the Paronsina broke into incoherent mockeries, that hurt more from their purpose than their point, and gave no one greater pain than herself.
Tonelli sat sad and perfectly mute under the infliction, but he said in his heart, “I have merited worse.”
At first the signora remained quite aghast; but when she collected herself, she called out peremptorily, “Madamigella, you push the affair a little beyond. Cease!”
The Paronsina, having said all she desired, ceased, panting.
The old notary, for whose slow sense all but her first words had been too quick, though all had been spoken at him, said dryly, turning to Tonelli, “I imagine that my deafness is not always a misfortune.”
It was by an inexplicable, but hardly less inevitable, violence to the inclinations of each that, after this miserable dinner, the signora, the Paronsina, and Tonelli should go forth together for their wonted promenade on the Molo. Use, which is the second, is also very often the stronger nature, and so these parted friends made a last show of union and harmony. In nothing had their amity been more fatally broken than in this careful homage to its forms; and now, as they walked up and down in the moonlight, they were of the saddest kind of apparitions, — not mere disembodied spirits, which, however, are bad enough, but disanimated bodies, which are far worse, and of which people are not more afraid only because they go about in society so commonly. As on many and many another night of summers past, the moon came up and stood over the Lido, striking far across the glittering lagoon, and everywhere winning the flattered eye to the dark masses of shadow upon the water; to the trees of the Gardens, to the trees and towers and domes of the cloistered and templed isles. Scene of pensive and incomparable loveliness! giving even to the stranger, in some faint and most unequal fashion, a sense of the awful meaning of exile to the Venetian, who in all other lands in the world is doubly an alien, from their unutterable unlikeness to his sole and beautiful city. The prospect had that pathetic unreality to the frie
nds which natural things always assume to people playing a part, and I imagine that they saw it not more substantial than it appears to the exile in his dreams. In their promenade they met again and again the unknown, wonted faces; they even encountered some acquaintances, whom they greeted, and with whom they chatted for a while; and when at nine the bronze giants beat the hour upon their bell, — with as remote effect as if they were giants of the times before the flood, — they were aware of Pennellini, promptly appearing like an exact and methodical spectre.
But to-night the Paronsina, who had made the scene no compliments, did not insist as usual upon the ice at Florian’s; and Pennellini took his formal leave of the friends under the arch of the Clock Tower, and they walked silently homeward through the echoing Merceria.
At the notary’s gate Tonelli would have said good-night, but the signora made him enter with them, and then abruptly left him standing with the Paronsina in the gallery, while she was heard hurrying away to her own apartment. She reappeared, extending toward Tonelli both hands, upon which glittered and glittered manifold skeins of the delicate chain of Venice.
She had a very stately and impressive bearing, as she stood there in the moonlight, and addressed him with a collected voice. “Tonelli,” she said, “I think you have treated your oldest and best friends very cruelly. Was it not enough that you should take yourself from us, but you must also forbid our hearts to follow you even in sympathy and good wishes? I had almost thought to say adieu forever to-night; but,” she continued, with a breaking utterance, and passing tenderly to the familiar form of address, “I cannot part so with thee. Thou hast been too like a son to me, too like a brother to my poor Clarice. Maybe thou no longer lovest us, yet I think thou wilt not disdain this gift for thy wife. Take it, Tonelli, if not for our sake, perhaps then for the sake of sorrows that in times past we have shared together in this unhappy Venice.”
Here the signora ended perforce the speech, which had been long for her, and the Paronsina burst into a passion of weeping, — not more at her mamma’s words than out of self-pity and from the national sensibility.
Tonelli took the chain, and reverently kissed it and the hands that gave it. He had a helpless sense of the injustice the signora’s words and the Paronsina’s tears did him; he knew that they put him with feminine excess further in the wrong than even his own weakness had; but he tried to express nothing of this, — it was but part of the miserable maze in which his life was involved. With what courage he might he owned his error, but protested his faithful friendship, and poured out all his troubles, — his love for Carlotta, his regret for them, his shame and remorse for himself. They forgave him, and there was everything in their words and will to restore their old friendship, and keep it; and when the gate with a loud clang closed upon Tonelli, going from them, they all felt that it had irrevocably perished.
I do not say that there was not always a decent and affectionate bearing on the part of the Paronsina and her mother towards Tonelli and his wife; I acknowledge that it was but too careful and faultless a tenderness, ever conscious of its own fragility. Far more natural was the satisfaction they took in the delayed fruitfulness of Tonelli’s marriage, and then in the fact that his child was a girl, and not a boy. It was but human that they should doubt his happiness, and that the signora should always say, when hard pressed with questions upon the matter: “Yes, Tonelli is married; but if it were to do again, I think he would do it to-morrow rather than to-day.”
THE END
BUYING A HORSE
If one has money enough, there seems no reason why one should not go and buy such a horse as he wants. This is the commonly accepted theory, on which the whole commerce in horses is founded, and on which my friend proceeded.
He was about removing from Charlesbridge, where he had lived many happy years without a horse, farther into the country, where there were charming drives and inconvenient distances, and where a horse would be very desirable, if not quite necessary. But as a horse seemed at first an extravagant if not sinful desire, he began by talking vaguely round, and rather hinting than declaring that he thought somewhat of buying. The professor to whom he first intimated his purpose flung himself from his horse’s back to the grassy border of the sidewalk where my friend stood, and said he would give him a few points. “In the first place don’t buy a horse that shows much daylight under him, unless you buy a horse-doctor with him; get a short-legged horse; and he ought to be short and thick in the barrel,” — or words to that effect. “Don’t get a horse with a narrow forehead: there are horse-fools as well as the other kind, and you want a horse with room for brains. And look out that he’s all right forward.”
“What’s that?” asked my friend, hearing this phrase for the first time.
“That he isn’t tender in his fore-feet, — that the hoof isn’t contracted,” said the professor, pointing out the well-planted foot of his own animal.
“What ought I to pay for a horse?” pursued my friend, struggling to fix the points given by the professor in a mind hitherto unused to points of the kind.
“Well, horses are cheap, now; and you ought to get a fair family horse — You want a family horse?”
“Yes.”
“Something you can ride and drive both? Something your children can drive?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, you ought to get such a horse as that for a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
This was the figure my friend had thought of; he drew a breath of relief. “Where did you buy your horse?”
“Oh, I always get my horses” — the plural abashed my friend— “at the Chevaliers’. If you throw yourself on their mercy, they’ll treat you well. I’ll send you a note to them.”
“Do!” cried my friend, as the professor sprang upon his horse, and galloped away.
My friend walked home encouraged; his purpose of buying a horse had not seemed so monstrous, at least to this hardened offender. He now began to announce it more boldly; he said right and left that he wished to buy a horse, but that he would not go above a hundred. This was not true, but he wished to act prudently, and to pay a hundred and twenty-five only in extremity. He carried the professor’s note to the Chevaliers’, who duly honored it, understood at once what my friend wanted, and said they would look out for him. They were sorry he had not happened in a little sooner, — they had just sold the very horse he wanted. I may as well say here that they were not able to find him a horse, but that they used him with the strictest honor, and that short of supplying his want they were perfect.
In the mean time the irregular dealers began to descend upon him, as well as amateurs to whom he had mentioned his wish for a horse, and his premises at certain hours of the morning presented the effect of a horse-fair, or say rather a museum of equine bricabrac. At first he blushed at the spectacle, but he soon became hardened to it, and liked the excitement of driving one horse after another round the block, and deciding upon him. To a horse, they had none of the qualities commended by the professor, but they had many others which the dealers praised. These persons were not discouraged when he refused to buy, but cheerfully returned the next day with others differently ruinous. They were men of a spirit more obliging than my friend has found in other walks. One of them, who paid him a prefatory visit in his library, in five minutes augmented from six to seven hundred and fifty pounds the weight of a pony-horse, which he wished to sell. (“What you want,” said the Chevaliers, “is a pony-horse,” and my friend, gratefully catching at the phrase, had gone about saying he wanted a pony-horse. After that, hulking brutes of from eleven to thirteen hundred pounds were every day brought to him as pony-horses.) The same dealer came another day with a mustang, in whom was no fault, and who had every appearance of speed, but who was only marking time as it is called in military drill, I believe, when he seemed to be getting swiftly over the ground; he showed a sociable preference for the curbstone in turning corners, and was condemned, to be replaced the next evening by a pony-hors
e that a child might ride or drive, and that especially would not shy. Upon experiment, he shied half across the road, and the fact was reported to the dealer. He smiled compassionately. “What did he shy at?”
“A wheelbarrow.”
“Well! I never see the hoss yet that wouldn’t shy at a wheelbarrow.”
My friend owned that a wheelbarrow was of an alarming presence, but he had his reserves respecting the self-control and intelligence of this pony-horse. The dealer amiably withdrew him, and said that he would bring next day a horse — if he could get the owner to part with a family pet — that would suit; but upon investigation it appeared that this treasure was what is called a calico-horse, and my friend, who was without the ambition to figure in the popular eye as a stray circus-rider, declined to see him.
These adventurous spirits were not squeamish. They thrust their hands into the lathery mouths of their brutes to show the state of their teeth, and wiped their fingers on their trousers or grass afterwards, without a tremor, though my friend could never forbear a shudder at the sight. If sometimes they came with a desirable animal, the price was far beyond his modest figure; but generally they seemed to think that he did not want a desirable animal. In most cases, the pony-horse pronounced sentence upon himself by some gross and ridiculous blemish; but sometimes my friend failed to hit upon any tenable excuse for refusing him. In such an event, he would say, with an air of easy and candid comradery, “Well, now, what’s the matter with him?” And then the dealer, passing his hand down one of the pony-horse’s fore-legs, would respond, with an upward glance of searching inquiry at my friend, “Well, he’s a leetle mite tender for’a’d.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1095