by Ouida
The Lady Hilda, who was too truly great an élégante ever to condescend in the open air to the eccentricities and bizarreries of Madame Mila — mountebankisms worthy a travelling show, she considered them to be — was clad in her black sables, which contrasted so well with the fairness of her skin, and drove out with the Princess Olga; Carlo Maremma and M. de St. Louis fronting them in the Schouvaloff barouche. She did not hate the cold, and shiver from the fresh sea-wind, and worry about the badness of the steep roads as Madame Mila did; on the contrary, she liked the drive, long though it was, and felt a vague interest in the first sight of Palestrina, its towers and belfries shining white on the mountain side, with the little villages clustered under its broad dark ring of forest.
“What a pity that Paolo is so poor!” said Carlo Maremma, looking upward at it.
“He carries his poverty with infinite grace,” said the Princess Olga.
“He is worthy of riches,” said the Duc.
Lady Hilda said nothing.
Palestrina was twelve miles and more from the city, and stood on the high hills facing the south-west; it was half fortress, half palace; in early times its lords had ruled from its height all the country round; and later on, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, a great Cardinal of the Della Rocca had made it into as sumptuous a dwelling-place as Caprarola or Poggio a Cajano.
Subsequently the family had ranged itself against the ruling faction of the province, and had suffered from war and confiscation; still later, Palestrina had been plundered by the French troops of Napoleon; yet, despoiled and impoverished as it was, it was majestic still, and even beautiful; for, unlike most such places, it had kept its girdle of oak and ilex woods; and its gardens, though wild and neglected, were unshorn of their fair proportions; and the fountains fell into their marble basins, and splashed the maiden-hair ferns that hung over them as they had dope in another age for the delight of the great Cardinal and his favourites.
Della Rocca received them in the southern loggia, a beautiful vaulted and frescoed open gallery, designed by Bramante, and warm in the noonday sun, as though January were June.
A king could not have had more grace of welcome and dignity of courtesy than this ruined gentleman — he had a very perfect manner, certainly, thought Lady Hilda once again. She was one of those women (they are many) upon whom manner makes more impression than mind or morals. Why should it not? It is the charm of life and the touchstone of breeding.
There was only one friend with him, a great minister, who had retired from the world and given himself up to the culture of roses and strawberries. There was a simple repast, from the produce of his own lands, ready in what had been once the banqueting hall. It was made graceful by the old Venetian glass, the old Urbino plates, the old Cellini salt-cellars; and by grapes, regina and salamana, saved from the autumn, and bouquets of Parma violets and Bengal roses, in old blue Savona vases. It was a frugal meal, but fit for the Tale-tellers of the Decameron.
They rambled over the great building first, with its vast windows showing the wide landscape of mountain and plain, and far away the golden domes and airy spires of the city shining through a soft mist of olive trees. The glory of this house was gone, but it was beautiful still with the sweet clear sunlight streaming through its innumerable chambers, and touching the soft hues of frescoed walls that had grown faded with age, but had been painted by Spinello, by Francia, by the great Frate, and by a host whose names were lost, of earnest workers, and men with whom art had been religion.
It was all dim and worn and grey with the passage of time; but it was harmonious, majestic, tranquil. It was like the close of a great life withdrawn from the world into a cloistered solitude and content to be alone with its God.
“Do not wish for riches,” said the Lady Hilda to him, as he said something to her of it. “If you had riches you would desecrate this; you would ‘restore’ it, you would ‘embellish’ it, you would ruin it.”
He smiled a little sadly.
“As it is, I can only keep the rains from entering and the rats from destroying it. Poverty, Madame, is only poetical to those who do not suffer it. Look!” he added, with a laugh, “you will not find a single chair, I fear, that is not in tatters.”
She glanced at the great old ebony chair she was resting in, with its rich frayed tapestry seat, and its carved armorial bearings.
“I have suffered much more from the staring, gilded, and satin abominations in a millionaire’s drawing-room. You are ungrateful—”
“And you, Madame, judge of pains that have never touched, and cannot touch you. However, I can be but too glad that Palestrina pleases you in any way. It has the sunshine of heaven, though not of fortune.”
“And I am sure you would not give it up for all the wealth of the Rothschilds.”
“No.”
“How lovely this place would look,” Madame Mila was saying at the same moment, out of his hearing, to the Princess Olga, “if Owen Jones could renovate it and Huby furnish it. Fancy it with all the gilding re-gilded, and the pictures restored, and Aubusson and Persian carpets everywhere, and all those horrid old tapestries, that must be full of spiders, pulled down and burnt. What a heavenly place it would be — and what balls one might give in it! Why, it would hold ten thousand people!”
“Poor Paolo will never be able to do it,” said the Princess Schouvaloff, “unless—”
She glanced at the Lady Hilda where she sat, at the further end of the chamber, whilst Della Rocca leaned against the embrasure of the window.
“I think she has a fancy for him,” said Madam Mila. “But as for marrying, you know, — that, of course, is out of the question.”
“I don’t see why,” said the Princess.
“Oh, out of the question;” said Madame Mila, hastily. “But if she should take a liking to him, it would be great fun. She’s been so awfully exaltée about all that sort of thing. Dear me, what a pity all those nasty, old, dull frescoes can’t be scraped off and something nice and bright, like what they paint now, be put there; but I suppose it would take so much money. I should hang silk over them; all these clouds of pale angels would make me melancholy mad. There is no style I care a bit for but Louis Quinze. I am having new wall hangings for my salon done by the Ste. Marie Réparatrice girls; a lovely green satin — apple-green — embroidered with wreaths of roses and broom, after flower-groups by Fantin. Louis Quinze is so cheerful, and lets you have such lots of gilding, and the tables have such nice straight legs, and you always feel with it as if you were in a theatre and expecting the Jeune Prémier to enter. Here one feels as if one were in a church,”
“A monastery,” suggested Princess Olga.
Thereon they went and had their luncheon, and Madame Mila studying the Capo da Monte dessert-service, appraised its value — for she was a shrewd little woman — and wondered, if Paolo della Rocca were so poor as they said, why did he not send up all these old porcelains. and lovely potteries to the Hôtel Drouot: Capo da Monte, she reflected, sells for more than its weight in gold, now that it is the rage of the fashion. She felt inclined to suggest this to him, only she was not quite sure how he might take it. Italians, she had heard, were so absurdly proud and susceptible.
After luncheon, they went into the green old gardens; green with ilex and arbutus and laurel and cypress avenues, although it was mid-winter; and the great minister discoursed on the charms of the country and the beauty of solitude in a way that should almost have awakened the envy of Horace in his grave; and the Duc de St. Louis disagreed with him in witty arguments that might have made the shades of Rochefoucauld and Rivarol jealous.
And they rambled and idled and talked and sauntered in those charming hours which an Italian villa alone can create; and then the Ave Maria chimed from the belfries of a convent up above on the hill, and the winds grew chill, and the carriages were called round to the steps of the southern terrace, and the old steward brought to each lady the parting gift of a great cluster of the sweet Parma violets.
“Well, it’s been pleasanter than I thought for,” said Madame Mila, rolling homeward. “But oh, this wretched, odious road! I shall catch my death of cold, and I daresay we shall all be killed on these horrible hills in the dark!” Lady Hilda was very silent as they drove downward, and left Palestrina alone to grow grey in the shades of the twilight.
CHAPTER VI.
“I THINK Italians are like Russian tea; they spoil you for any other—” wrote Lady Hilda to her brother Clairvaux. It was not a very clear phrase, nor very grammatical; but she knew what she meant herself, which is more than all writers can say they do.
Russian tea, or rather tea imported through Russia, is so much softer and of so much sweeter and subtler a flavour, that once drinking it you will find all other tea after it seem flat or coarse. When she had written this sentiment, however, she tore up the sheet of note paper which contained it, and tossed it in the fire; after all, Clairvaux would not understand — he never understood anything, dear old fellow — and he would be very likely to say all sorts of foolish things while there was not the slightest reason for any one’s supposing.
“Do come out here as soon as you can,” she wrote instead. “Of course it will all depend on your racing engagements; but if you do go to Paris to see Charles Lafitte, as you say, pray come on here. Not that you will care for Floralia at all; you never do care for these art cities, and it is its art, and its past, and its people that make its irresistible charm. Floralia is so graceful and so beautiful and so full of noble memories that one cannot but feel the motley society of our own present day as a sort of desecration to it; the cocottes and cocodettes, the wheel-skaters and poker-players, the smokers and the baigneuses, the viveurs and the viveuses of our time suit it sadly ill; it wants the scholars of Academe, the story-tellers of Boccaccio; it wants Sordello and Stradella, Desdemona and Giulietta.
“One feels oneself not one half good enough for the stones one treads upon; life here should be a perpetual Kyrie Eleison; instead of which it is only a chorus of Offenbach’s. Not that society anywhere, now, ever does rise higher than that; only here it jars on one more than elsewhere, and seems as profane as if one ‘played ball with Homer’s skull.’
“Floralia is a golden Ostensoir filled with great men’s bones, and we choke it up with cigar ashes and champagne dregs. It cannot be helped, I suppose. The destiny of the age seems to be to profane all that have preceded it. It creates nothing — it desecrates everything. Society does not escape from the general influence; its kings are all kings of Brentford.
“Mila — who is here and happy as a bird — thinks Jack Cade and the Offenbach chorus the perfection of delight at all times.
“For myself, I confess, neither entertain me; I fail to see the charm of a drawing-room democracy décolleté and décousu; and I never did appreciate ladies who pass their lives in balancing themselves awkwardly on the bar of Dumas’s famous Triangle; but that may be a prejudice — Mila says that it is.
“By-the-by, that odious young Des Gommeux has followed her here — I make myself disagreeable to him. I cannot do more. Spiridion has never interfered, and ‘on ne peut pas être plus royaliste que le roi.’ But you will skip all this, or give it to your wife. I know I never read letters myself, so why should I expect you to do so? — I am so sorry to hear of Vieille Garde’s sprain; it is too vexing for you, just as he was so high in the betting. I hope Sister to Simonides turns out worth all we gave for her. There will be racing here in April, but it would only make you laugh — which would be rude; or swear — which would be worse. So please come long before it.” She folded up her letter, wrote “Pray try and come soon” across the top of it, and directed the envelope to the Earl of Clairvaux, Broomsden, Northampton, and then was provoked to think that she did not want good, clumsy, honest Clairvaux to come at all — not in her heart of hearts, because Clairvaux was always asking questions, and going straight to the bottom of things in his own simple, sturdy fashion, and never understood anything that was in the very least complex.
And then again she was more irritated still with herself, for admitting even to her own thoughts that there was anything complex, or that she did not want to examine too closely — just yet. And then she sat and looked into the fire, and thought of Palestrina, with its sweet faint scent of Parma violets, and its dim noble frescoes, and its mountain solitudes, under the clear winter moon.
She sat dreaming about it a long time — for her, because she was not a person that dreamed at all usually. Her life was too brilliant, and too much occupied, and too artificial. She was thinking, with a great deal of money, without desecrating it by “restoration but by bringing all the art knowledge in the world to its enrichment, it would be possible to make it as great as it had been in the days of its cardinal. What a pastime it would be, what an interest, what an occupation almost for a lifetime to render that grand old palace once more the world’s wonder it had been in the sixteenth century!
Then she rose suddenly with an impatient sigh, and went into her bedroom, and found fault with her maids: they had put Valenciennes on her petticoats, and she hated Valenciennes — no other lace had been so cheapened by imitation; they had put out her marron velvet with the ostrich feathers for that day’s wearing, when they should have laid out the silver-grey cloth with the Genoa buttons; they were giving her glacé gloves instead of peau de Suède; they had got out Pompadour boots, and she required Paysanne shoes; it was a fine dry day. In point of fact, everything was wrong, and they were idiots, and she told them so as strongly as a high-bred lady can demean herself to speak. Each costume was put all together — dress, bonnet, boots, gloves — everything; what business had they to go and mix them all up and make everything wrong?
Her maids were used to her displeasure; but she was very generous, and if they were ill or in sorrow she was kind, so that they bore it meekly, and contented themselves with complaining of her in all directions to their allies.
“If she would only have her petites affaires like other ladies she would be much easier to content,” said her head maid, who had served the aristocracy ever since the earliest days of the Second Empire.
When there were no lovers, there were much fewer douceurs and perquisites; however, they endured that deprivation because Miladi was so very rich, and so easily plundered.
Miladi, now, arrayed in the silver-grey cloth with the Genoa buttons and the marabout feather trimming, went out to her victoria, en route to the galleries, of which she never tired, and the visits which immeasurably bored her. She had been in the great world for ten years, and the great world is too small to divert one for very long, unless one be as Madame Mila.
Nevertheless, the Lady Hilda found that Floralia interested her more than she would have believed that anything would do.
After all, Floralia was charming by the present, not only by the past.
If it had its kings of Brentford, with its Offenbach choruses, so had every other place; if it had a pot pourri of nationalties, it had some of the most agreeable persons of every nation; if trying to be very naughty it generally only became very dull — that was the doom of modern society everywhere.
There were charming houses in it, where there were real wit, real music, and real welcome. If people saw each other too often, strong friendships could come out of such frequency as well as animosities; and there was a great charm in the familiar, easy, pleasant intimacies which so naturally grew out of the artistic idling under these sombre and noble walls, and in the palaces where all the arts once reigned.
She had begun to take the fair city into her heart, as everyone who has a heart must needs do, having once dwelt within the olive girdle of its pure pale hills, and seen its green waters wash the banks erst peopled with the gorgeous splendours of the Renaissance.
She even began to like her daily life in it; the mornings dreamed away before some favourite Giorgione or Veronese, or spent in dim old shops full of the oddest mingling of rubbish and of treasure; the twilights spent in
picture-like old chambers, where dames of high degree had made their winter-quarters, fragrant with flowers and quaint with old tapestries and porcelains; the evenings passed in a society which, too motley to be intimate, yet too personal to dare be witty, was gradually made more than endurable to her, by the sound of one voice for which she listened more often than she knew, by the sight of one face which grew more necessary to her than she was aware.
“If one could be only quite alone here it would be too charming,” she thought, driving this morning, while the sun shone on the golden reaches of the river, and the softly-coloured marbles caught the light, and the picturesque old shops gleamed many-hued as harlequin under the beetling brows of projecting roofs, and the carved stone of dark archways.
But if she had looked close into her own heart she would have seen that the solitude of her ideal would have been one like the French poet’s — solitude à deux.
She did not go, after all, to her visits; she went instead, in and out of the studios whose artists adored her, though she was terribly hard to please, and had much more acquaintance with art than is desirable in a purchaser.
In one of the studios she chanced to meet the master of Palestrina; and he went with her to another atelier, and another and another.
She had her Paysanne shoes on, and her goldheaded cane, and let her victoria stand still while she walked from one to the other of those sculptors’ and painters’ dens, which lie so close together, like beavers’ work in the old grey quarters of the city.
Up and down the dark staircases, and in and out the gloomy vaulted passages, her silver-grey cloth with the marabout ruches gleamed and glistened, and to many of the artists proved as beneficent as a silvery cloud to the thirsty fields in summer.