by Ouida
Lady Hilda looked at him as he spoke with an eloquence and earnestness which absorbed him for the moment, so that he forgot that he was talking to a woman, and a woman whose whole life was one of trifling, of languor, and of extravagance.
“All that is very true,” she said, with some hesitation; “but why then do you hold yourself aloof — why do you do nothing to change this state of public things? You see the evil, but you prescribe no remedy.”
“The only remedy will be Time,” he answered her. “Corruption has eaten too deeply into the heart of this nation to be easily eradicated. The knife of war has not cut it out; we can only hope for what the medicines of education and of open discussion may do; the greatest danger lies in the inertia of the people; they are angry often, but they do not move—”
“Neither do you move, though you are angry.” He smiled a little sadly.
“If I were a rich man I would do so. Poor as I am I could not embrace public life without seeming to seek my own private ends from office. A man without wealth has no influence, and his motives will always be suspected — at least here.”
“But one should be above suspicion—”
“Were one certain to do good — yes.”
“But why should you despair? You have a country of boundless resources, a people affectionate, impressionable, infinitely engaging, and much more intelligent naturally than any other populace, a soil that scarce needs touching to yield the richest abundance, and in nearly every small town or obscure city some legacy of art or architecture, such as no other land can show—”
“Despair! God forbid that I should despair. I think there is infinite hope, but I cannot disguise from myself that there are infinite dangers also. An uneducated peasantry has had its religion torn away from it, and has no other moral landmark set to cling to; old ways and old venerations are kicked aside and nothing substituted; public business means almost universally public pillage; the new text placed before the regenerated nation is, ‘make money, honestly if you can — but make money!’ haste, avarice, accumulation, cunning, neglect of all loveliness, desecration of all ancientness — these, the modern curses which accompany ‘progress’ — are set before a scarcely awakened people as the proper objects and idols of their efforts. We, who are chiefly to be moved by our affections and our imaginations, are only bidden to be henceforth inspired by a joyless prosperity and a loveless materialism. We, the heirs of the godhead of the Arts, are only counselled to emulate the mechanical inventions and the unscrupulous commerce of the American genius, and are ordered to learn to blush with shame because our ancient cities, sacred with the ashes of heroes, are not spurious brand-new lath and plaster human ant-hills of the growth of yesterday! — Forgive me, Madame,” he said, interrupting himself, with a little laugh, “I forget that I am tedious to you. With the taxes at fifty-two per cent., a poor landowner like myself may incline to think that all is not as well as it should be.”
“You interest me,” said the Lady Hilda, and her eyes dwelt on him with a grave, musing regard that they had given to no man, “and on your own lands, with your own people — how is it there?”
His face brightened.
“My people love me,” he said, softly. “As for the lands — when one is poor, one cannot do much; but every one is content on them — that is something.”
“Is it not everything?” said the Lady Hilda, with a little sigh; for she herself, who could gratify her every wish, had never yet quite known what content could mean. “Let us go and look at the ball-room; Mila will be coming to know if we have heard of MacMahon’s death, that we talk so seriously,”
She walked, on his arm, to the scene of tumult, where being hemmed in by lookers-on till the pressure left them scarcely any space to perform upon, the dancers were going through a quadrille with exceeding vivacity, and with strong reminiscences in it of some steps of the cancan; Madame Mila and Lady Featherleigh particularly distinguishing themselves by their imitations of the Chimpanzee dance, as performed in the last winter’s operetta of Ching-aring-aring-ching.
They were of course being watched and applauded very loudly by the ring of spectators as if they were really the actors in the Ching-aring-aring-ching, which afforded them the liveliest pleasure possible, great ladies being never so happy now-a-days as when they are quite sure that they might really be taken for comedians or courtezans It was hard upon Madame Mila that just as she had jumped so high that La Petite Boulotte herself could scarcely have jumped higher, the lookers-on turned their heads to see the Lady Hilda in the doorway on the arm of her white Mousquetaire. Lady Hilda was beyond all dispute the most beautiful woman of the rooms, she threw them all into the shade as a rose diamond throws stars of strass; and many of the men were so dazzled by her appearance there, that they actually lost the sight of Madame Mila’s rose-coloured stockings twinkling in the air.
“Paolo fait bonne fortune,” they said to one another, and began to make wagers that she would marry him, or, on the other hand, that she was only playing with him: opinion varied, and bets ran high.
Society bets on everything — peace and love, and honour and happiness, are only “staying” horses or “non-stayers,” on whose running the money is piled. It is fortunate indeed and rare when the betting is “honest,” and if the drinking waters of peace be not poisoned on purpose, or the smooth turf of a favourite’s career be not sprinkled with glass, by those who have laid the odds heavily against it. So that they land their bets, what do they care whether or no the subject of their speculations be lamed for life and destined to drag out its weary days between the cab-shafts till the end comes in the knacker’s yard?
As for the Lady Hilda, she was so used to be the observed of all observers wherever she went, that she never heeded who looked at her, and never troubled herself what anybody might say.
She walked about with Della Rocca, talked with him, and let him sit by her in little sheltered camellia-filled velvet-hung nooks, because it pleased her, and because he looked like an old Velasquez picture in that white Louis Treize dress. Of what anybody might think she was absolutely indifferent; she was not mistress of herself and of fifty thousand a year to care for the tittle-tattle of a small winter city.
It was very pleasant to be mistress of herself — to do absolutely as she chose — to have no earthly creature to consult — to go to bed in Paris and wake up in St. Petersburg if the fancy took her — to buy big diamonds till she could outblaze Lady Dudley — to buy thoroughbred horses and old pictures and costly porcelains and all sorts of biblots, ancient and curious, that might please her taste — to obey every caprice of the moment and to have no one to be responsible to for its indulgence — to write a cheque for a large amount if she saw any great distress that was painful to look upon — to adorn her various houses with all that elegance of whim and culture of mind could gather together from the treasures of centuries — to do just as she pleased, in a word, without any one else to ask, or any necessity to ponder whether the expense were wise. It was very agreeable to be mistress of herself, and yet —
There is a capitalist in Europe who is very unhappy because all his wealth cannot purchase the world-famous Key of the Strozzi Princes.
Lady Hilda was never unhappy, but she was not quite content.
Out of the very abundance of her life she was weary, and there was a certain coldness in it all; it was too like one of her own diamonds.
She sighed a little to-night when her white Mousquetaire had led her to her carriage, and she was rolling across the bridge homeward, whilst Madame Mila’s gossamer skirts were still twirling, and her rosy stockings still twinkling in all the intricacies and diversions with which the Vicomte Maurice would keep the cotillon going until nine o’clock in the morning.
In the darkness of her carriage, as it went over the stones through the winding ill-lit streets, she saw soft amorous eyes looking at her under their dreamy lids; she could not forget their look; she was haunted by it — it had said so much.
; The tale it had told was one she had heard indeed twenty times a year for ten long years, and it had never moved her; it had bored her — nothing more.
But now — a sudden warmth, a strange emotion, thrilled in her, driving through the dark with the pressure of his hand still seeming to linger upon hers.
It was such an old old tale that his eyes had told, and yet for once it had touched her somehow and made her heart quicken, her colour rise.
“It is too ridiculous!” she said to herself. “I am dreaming. Fancy my caring!”
And she was angry with herself, and when she reached her own rooms looked a moment at her full reflection in the long mirrors, diamonds and all, before she rang for her maid to come to her.
It was a brilliant and beautiful figure that she saw there in the gorgeous colours copied from a picture by Watteau le Jeune, and with the great stones shining above her head and on her breast like so many little dazzling suns.
She had loved herself very dearly all her life, lived for herself, and in a refined and lofty way had been as absolutely self-engrossed and amorous of her own pleasure and her own vanities as the greediest and cruellest of ordinary egotists.
“Am I a fool?” she said, angrily, to her own image. “It is too absurd! Why should he move me more than anyone of all the others?”
And yet suddenly all the life which had so well satisfied her seemed empty — seemed cold and hard as one of her many diamonds.
She rang with haste and impatience for her maid; and all they did, from the hot soup they brought to the way they untwisted her hair, was wrong; and when she lay down in her bed she could not sleep, and when the bright forenoon came full of the sound of pealing bells and gay street songs and hurrying feet, she fell into feverish dreams, and, waking later, did not know what ailed her.
From that time Della Rocca ceased to avoid the Hotel Murat; he was received there oftener than on her “day he went about with her on various pilgrimages to quaint old out-of-the-way nooks of forgotten art which he could tell her of, knowing every nook and corner of his native city; she almost always invited him when she had other people to dine with her; her cousin did the same, and he was usually included in all those manifold schemes for diversions which women like Madame Mila are always setting on foot, thinking with Diderot’s vagabond that it is something at any rate to have got rid of Time.
Sometimes he availed himself of these opportunities of Fortune, sometimes he did not. His conduct had a variableness about it which did more than anything else would have done to arrest the attention of a woman sated with homage as the Lady Hilda had been all her days. She missed him when he was absent; she was influenced by him when he was present.
Beneath the softness of his manner there was a certain seriousness which had its weight with her. He made her feel ashamed of many things.
Something in his way of life also attracted her. There are a freedom and simplicity in all the habits of an Italian noble that are in strong contrast with the formal conventionalism of the ways of other men; there is a feudal affectionateness of relation between him and his dependants which is not like anything else; when he knows anything of agriculture, and interests himself personally in his people, the result is an existence which makes the life of the Paris flâneurs and the London idlers look very poor indeed.
Palestrina often saw its lord drive thither by six in the morning, walk over his fields, hear grievances and redress them, mark out new vine-walks with his bailiff, watch his white oxen turn the sods of the steep slopes, and plan trench-cuttings to arrest the winter-swollen brooks, long before the men of his degree in Paris or in London opened their heavy eyes to call for their morning taste of brandy, and awoke to the recollection of their night’s gaming losses, or their wagers on coming races.
The finest of fine gentlemen, the grandest of grand seigneurs, in court or drawing-room or diplomatic circle, Paolo della Rocca, amongst his own grey olive orchards and the fragrance of his great wooden storehouses, was as simple as Cincinnatus, laughed like a boy with his old steward, caressed like a woman the broad heads of his beasts at the plough, and sat under a great mulberry to break his bread at noonday, hearkening to the talk of his peasants as though he were one of them.
The old Etrurian gentleness and love of the rural life are still alive in this land; may they never perish, for they are to the nation, as the timely rains to the vine, as the sweet strong sun to the harvest.
This simplicity, this naturalness, which in the Italian will often underlie the highest polish of culture and of ceremony, had a curious fascination for a woman in whose own life there had been no place for simplicity and no thought for nature.
She had been in the bonds of the world always, as a child in its swaddling bands; none the less so because she had been one of its leaders in those matters of supreme fashion wherein she had reigned as a goddess. Her life had been altogether artificial; she had always been a great garden lily in a hothouse, she had never known what it was to be blown by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The hothouse shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see no horizon from it; that alone is the joy of the moorland. Now and then, garden lily in a stove-heated palace though she was, some vague want, some dim unfulfilled wish, had stirred in her; she began to think now that it had been for that unknown horizon.
“Men live too much in herds, in crowded rooms, amongst stoves and gas jets,” he said to her once. “There are only two atmospheres that do one morally any good — the open air and the air of the cloister.”
“You mean that there are only two things that are good — activity and meditation?”
“I think so. The fault of society is that it substitutes for those, stimulants and stagnation.”
He made her think — he influenced her more than she knew. Under the caressing subserviency to her as of a courtier, she felt the power of a man who discerned life more clearly and more wisely than herself.
The chief evil of society lies in the enormous importance which it gives to trifles. She began to feel that with all her splendour she had been only occupied with trifles. Nature had been a sealed book to her, and she began to doubt that she had even understood Art.
“If you can be pleased with this,” says a great art-critic, ‘this’ being a little fresco of St. Anne, “you can see Floralia. But if not, — by all means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; you can never see it.”
The test may be a little exaggerated, but the general meaning of his words is correct.
Cosmopolitan and Anglo-American Floralia, for the main part, do not see the city they come to winter in; see nothing of its glories, of its sanctities, of its almost divinities; see only their own friends, their own faces, their own fans, flirtations, and fallals, reflected as in mirrors all around them, and filling up their horizon.
“A Dutchman can be just as solemnly and entirely contemplative of a lemon-pip and a cheeseparing as an Italian of the Virgin in glory.” Cosmopolitan and Anglo-American Floralia is in love with its lemon-pips, and has no eyes for the Glory. When it has an eye, indeed, it is almost worse, because it is bent then on buying the Glory for its drawing-room staircase, or worse yet, on selling it again at a profit.
The Lady Hilda, who did not love lemon-pips, but who yet had never seen the Glory with that simplicity, as of a child’s worship, which alone constitutes the true sight, began to unlearn many of her theories, and to learn very much in emotion and vision, as she carried her delicate disdainful head into the little dusky chapels and the quiet prayer-worn chauntries of Floralia.
Her love of Art had after all been a cold, she began to think a poor, passion. She had studied the philosophy of Art, had been learned in the contemplative and the dramatic schools, had known the signs manual of this epoch and the other, had discoursed learnedly of Lombard and Byzantine, of objective and subjective, of archaic and naturalistic; but all the while it had been not very much more than a scholarly jargon, a gracefu
l pedantry, which had served to make her doubly scornful of those more ignorant. Art is a fashion in some circles, as religion is in some, and license is in others; and Art had been scarcely deeper than a fashion with her, or cared for more deeply than as a superior kind of furniture.