by Ouida
But here, in this, the sweetest, noblest, most hallowed city of the world, which has been so full of genius in other times, that the fragrance thereof remains, as it were, upon the very stones, like that Persian attar, to make one ounce of which a hundred thousand roses die, here something much deeper yet much simpler came upon her.
Her theories melted away into pure reverence, her philosophies faded into tenderness; new revelations of human life came to her before those spiritual imaginings of men to whom the blue sky had seemed full of angels, and the watches of the night been stirred by the voice of God: before those old panels and old frescoes, often so simple, often so pathetic, always so sincere in faith and in work, she grew herself simpler and of more humility, and learned that art is a religion for whose right understanding one must needs become “even as a little child.”
She had been in great art cities before; in the home of Tintoretto and the Veronese, in the asylum of the Madonna de San Sisto, in the stone wilderness of Ludwig where the Faun sleeps in exile, in mighty Rome itself; but she had not felt as she felt now. She had been full of appreciation of their art, but they had left her as they had found her, cold, vain, self-engrossed, entirely shut in a Holy of Holies of culture and of criticism; she had covered her Cavalcaselle with pencil notes, and had glanced from a predella or — a pietà to the pages of her Ruskin with a serene smile of doubt.
But here and now Art ceased to be science, and became emotion in her. Why was it? — she did not care to ask herself.
Only all her old philosophies seemed falling about her like shed leaves, and her old self seemed to her but a purposeless frivolous chilly creature. The real reason she would not face, and indeed as yet was not conscious of; the reason that love had entered into her, and that love, if it be worth the name, has always two handmaidens: — swift sympathy, and sad humility, keeping step together.
CHAPTER VII.
FOREIGN Floralia, i.e.., that portion of Floralia which is not indigenous to the soil, but has only flown south with the swallows, is remarkable for a really god-like consciousness — it knows everything about every body, and all things, past, present, and to come, that ever did, could, would, should, cannot, will not, or never shall happen; and is aware of all things that have ever taken place, and of a great many things that never have done so. It is much better informed about you than you are yourself; knows your morals better than your confessor, your constitution better than your doctor, your income better than your banker, and the day you were born on, better than your mother.
It is omniscient and omnipresent, microscopic and telescopic; it is a court-edition of Scotland Yard, and a pocket-edition of the Cabinet Noir; it speeds as many interrogations as a telegraph-wire, and has as many mysteries as the agony column of a newspaper — only it always answers its own questions, and has all the keys to its own mysteries, and what is still more comforting, always knows everything for “certain.”
It knows that you starve your servants because you are poor and like to save on the butcher and baker; it knows that you overpay them because you are rich and want them to keep your secrets; it knows that your great grandmother’s second cousin was hanged for forgery at Tyburn; it knows that your silk stockings have cotton tops to them; it knows that your heirloom-guipure is imitation, made the other day at Rapallo; it knows that your Embassy only receives you because — hush — a great personage — ah, so very shocking; it knows that you had green peas six weeks before anybody else; it knows that you have had four dinner parties this week and are living on your capital; it knows that when you were in Rome you only went to the Quirinal Wednesdays, because (whisper, whisper, whisper) — oh, indeed it is perfectly true — had it on the best authority — dreadful, incredible, but perfectly true!
In point of fact there is nothing it doesn’t know.
Except, to be sure, it never knows that Mrs. Potiphar is not virtuous, or that Lady Messalina is not everything she should be; this it never knows and never admits, because if it did it could not very well drink the Potiphar champagne, and might lose for its daughters the Messalina balls. Indeed its perpetual loquacity, which is “as the waters come down at Lodore,” has most solemn and impressive interludes of refreshing dumbness and deafness when any incautious speaker, not trained to its ways, hints that Mrs. Potiphar lives in a queer manner, or that Lady Messalina would be out of society anywhere else; then indeed does Anglo-Saxon Floralia draw itself up with an injured dignity, and rebuke you with the murmur of — Christian charity.
In other respects however it has the soul of Samuel Pepys multiplied by five thousand.
It watched the progress of intimacy between Lady Hilda and the ruined lord of Palestrina, and knew “all about it,” — knew a vast deal more than the persons concerned, of course; it always does, or what would be the use of talking?
Gossiping over its bonbons and tea in the many pleasant houses in which the south wintering northern swallows nestle, it knew that he and she had been in love years and years before; the family would not let her marry him because he was so poor; it was the discovery of his letters to her that had killed poor old rich Vorarlberg; he and her brother had fought in the Bois — indeed! — oh yes, it was hushed up at the time, but it was quite true, and he had shot her brother in the shoulder; the surgeon who had attended the wounded man had told the physician who had attended the sister-in-law of the cousin of the most intimate friend of the lady who had vouched for this. There could not be better authority. But there never was anything against her? — oh dear me, no, never anything — everybody said this very warmly, because everybody had been, hoped to be, or at least would not despair of being, introduced to her and asked to dinner. It was very romantic, really most interesting; they had not met for nine years, and now! — ah, that explained all her coldness then, and that extraordinary rejection of the Crown Prince of Deutschland, which nobody ever had been able to understand. But was it not strange that he had never tried to resume his old influence before? No, he was as proud as he was poor, and besides they had quarrelled after the duel with her brother; they had parted one night very bitterly, after one of the Empress’s balls at St. Cloud, out on the terrace there; but he had always refused to give up her portrait; somebody had seen it upon his chest when he had been stripped in the hospital after Custozza; oh yes, they remembered that perfectly.
Altogether they made such a very pretty story that it was quite a pity that it was not true, and that the subjects of it had never met until the Duc de St. Louis had brought them face to face that winter. The one real truth which did begin to embitter the life of the Lady Hilda and lie heavy on her thoughts, waking and sleeping, was one that the garrulous gossiping Pepys-like northern swallows, chirping so busily, did not guess at all. Indeed, this is the sad fate which generally befalls Gossip.
It is like the poor devil in the legend of Fuggers Teuffelpalast at Trent; it toils till cockcrow picking up the widely-scattered grains of com by millions till the bushel measure is piled high, and lo! — the five grains that are the grains always escape its sight and roll away and hide themselves. The poor devil, being a primitive creature, shrieked and flew away in despair at his failure. Gossip hugs its false measure and says loftily that the five real grains are of no consequence whatever.
The Duc de St. Louis, who had not got the five grains any more than they had, yet who could have told them their bushelful was all wrong, like a wise man, seeing the project of his affections in a fair way towards realization — at least, so he thought — prudently abstained from saying one word about it to any one.
“Trop de zèle” spoiled everything, he knew, from politics to omelettes, from the making of proselytes to the frying of artichokes. A breath too much has before now toppled down the most carefully built house of cards. When to let things alone is perhaps the subtlest, rarest, and most useful of all knowledge.
A man here and there has it; it may be said that no woman has, has had, or ever will have it. If Napoleon had had it he might have die
d at eighty at St. Cloud instead of St. Helena. But genius, like woman, never has been known to have it. For genius and caution are as far apart as the poles.
“Tout va bien,” the Duc said to himself, taking off his hat to her when he saw Della Rocca by her carriage; meeting them in discussion before some painting or statue that she was about to buy; or watching them tête-à-tête on some couch of a ballroom, or in some nook of a gas-lit grove of camellias.
“Tout va bien,” said the Duc, smiling to himself, and speeding on his way to his various missions, reconciling angry ladies, making the prettiest flatteries to pretty ones, seeking some unobtainable enamel, ivory, or elzevir, penning sparkling proverbs in verse, arranging costume quadrilles, preventing duels, and smiling on débutantes, adjusting old quarrels, and hearing new tenors; always in a whirl of engagements, always courted and courteous, always the busiest, the wittiest, the happiest, the most urbane, the most charming, the most serene person in all Floralia. “Tout va bien,” said the Duc, and the town with him: the two persons concerned were neither of them quite so sure.
Meanwhile, for a little space the name and fame and ways and wonders of the Lady Hilda which filled Floralia with a blaze as of electric lights, quelling all lesser luminaries, was almost disregarded in a colossal sentiment, a gigantic discussion, a debate which, for endless eloquence and breathless conflict, would require the dithyrambs of Pindar meetly to record: — the grave question of who would, and who would not, go to the Postiche ball.
“Number One goes to dine with Number Two, only that he may say he did so to Number Three,” some cynic has declared; but Floralia improves even on this; before it goes to dine or dance, it spends the whole week in trying to find out who all the Number Fours will be, or in declaring that if such and such a Number Four goes it does not think it can go itself — out of principle — all which diversions wile its time away and serve to amuse it as a box of toys a child. Not that it ever fails to go and dine or dance, — only it likes to discuss it dubiously in this way.
The Postiche ball was really a thing to move society to its depths.
The wintering-swallows had never been so fluttered about anything since the mighty and immortal question of the previous season, when a Prince of the H. E. Empire, a United Netherlands Minister, and a Duc et Pair of France, had all been asked to dinner together with their respective wives at an American house, and the hostess and all the swallows with her had lived in agonies for ten days previously, torn to pieces by the terrible doubts of Precedence; beseeching and receiving countless counsels and councillors and consulting authorities and quoting precedents with the research of Max Müller and the zeal of Dr. Kenealy.
But the Postiche ball was a much wider, indeed almost an international matter; because the Anglo-Saxon races had staked their lives that it should be a success; and the Latin and Muscovite had declared that it would be a failure; and everybody was dying to go, and yet everybody was ashamed to go, a state of mind which constitutes the highest sort of social ecstacy in this age of composite emotions.
Mr and Mrs. Joshua R. Postiche, some said, were Jews, and some said were Dutch, and some said were half-castes from Cuba, and some said were Americans from Arkansas, and some said had been usurers, and some gin-spinners, and some opium dealers, and some things even yet worse; at any rate they had amassed, somehow or other, a great deal of money, and had therefore got into society by dint of a very large expenditure and the meekest endurance of insults; and had made an ancient palace as gaudy and garish as any brand-new hotel at Nice or Scarboro’, and gathered in it all the cosmopolitan crowd of Floralia; some of the Italian planets and Muscovite stars alone hanging aloof in a loftier atmosphere, to the very great anguish of the Joshua R. Postiches.
The ball was to be a wonderful ball, and the cotillon presents were whispered to have cost thirty thousand francs, and there were various rumours of a “surprise” there would be at it, as poor Louis Napoleon used to promise the Parisians one for the New Year. Louis Napoleon’s promises always ended in smoke, but the surprise of the Joshua R. Postiches was always to be reckoned on as something excellent: — salmon come straight from the Scotch rivers; lobsters stewed in tokay du krone; French comic actors fetched from Paris; some great singer, paid heaven knew what for merely opening her mouth; some dove flying about with jewels in his beak for everybody, or something of that sort, which showed that the Joshua R. Postiches, wherever they had been “raised,” or even if they had kept a drinking-bar and eating-shop in Havannah, as some people said, were at all events persons who knew the requirements of their own generation and the way to mount into “La Halite.”
Why they wanted to get there no mortal could tell; they had no children, and were both middle-aged; but no doubt, if you have not been used to them, the cards of countesses are as balm in Gilead, and to see a fashionable throng come up your staircase is to have attained the height of human desire.
At any rate, the Joshua B. Postiches had set their souls on this sort of social success, and they achieved it; receiving at their parties many distinguished and infinitely bored personages who had nothing to do in Floralia, and would have cut them in Paris, Vienna, or London, with the blandest and blankest stare of unconsciousness.
Madame Mila was on the point of adding herself to those personages.
“I must go to the ball,” she said. “Oh, it will be the best thing of the season except Nina Trasimene’s — I must go to the ball — but then I can’t endure to know the woman.”
“Can’t you go without knowing her?” said the Lady Hilda. “That has been done —— —”
Madame Mila did not feel the satire.
“Yes; one could do it in Paris or London; but not in a little place like this,” she answered, innocently. “I must let them present her to me — and I must leave a card. That is what’s so horrid. The woman is dreadful; she murders all the languages, and the man’s always looking about for a spittoon, and calls you my lady. They are too dreadful! But I must go to the ball. Besides, our own people want Maurice to lead the cotillon. Now Guido Salvareo is ill, there’s nobody that can come near Maurice—”
“But I suppose he would not dare to go if you were not there?”
“Of course he would not go; the idea! But I mean to go — I must go. I’m only thinking how I can get out of knowing the woman afterwards. Its so difficult in a small place, and I am always so good-natured in those things. I suppose it’s no use asking you to come, Hilda? else, if you would, you could cut them afterwards most deliciously, and I should do as you did. Left to myself, I’m always too good-natured.”
“I would do most things to please you, my dear Mila,” answered her cousin, “but I don’t think I can do that. You know it’s my rule never to visit people that I won’t let visit me — and I don’t like murdered languages, and being called ‘my lady.’”
“Oh, the people are horrid — I say so,” answered the Comtesse. “I shall have nothing to do with them, of course — after their ball.”
“But surely, it’s very low, Mila, that sort of thing. I know people do it nowadays. But really, to be a guest of a person you intend to cut next day—”
“What does it matter? She wants my name on her list; she gets it; I’m not bound to give her anything more. There is nothing unfair about it. She has what she wants, and more than she could expect. Of course, all that kind of persons must know perfectly well that we only go to them as we go to the opera, and have no more to do with them than we have with the opera door-keepers. Of course they know we don’t visit them as we visit our own people. But if snobbish creatures like those find pleasure in entertaining us, though they know quite well what we think of them, and how we esteem them, and why we go to them — well, I don’t see that they deserve anything better.”
“Nor I,” said the Lady Hilda. “Only I shouldn’t go to them — that’s all. And it is very funny, my love, that you, who have lived in all the great courts of Europe, and have had your own Embassy in London, should care one
straw for a ball at the Joshua R. Postiche’s. Good gracious! You must have seen about seventy thousand balls in your time!”
“I am only six years older than you, Hilda,” said she, tartly. “I suppose you’ve been telling Della Rocca not to go to the Postiche’s — Olga and the Baroness and Madame Valkyria, and scores of them have been trying to persuade him all the week, because if he stay away so many of the other men will; and none of us can stir him an inch about it. ‘On peut être de très-braves gens — mais je n’y vais pas,’ that is all he says; as if their being ‘braves gens’ or not had anything to do with it; and yet I saw him the other day with his hand on a contadino’s shoulder in the market-place, and he was calling him ‘carissimo mio.’”
“One of his own peasants, most likely,” said the Lady Hilda, coldly. “I have never heard these Postiches even mentioned by M. Della Rocca, and I certainly have nothing whatever to do with where he goes or doesn’t go.”
“He is always with you, at any rate,” said Madame Mila; “and if you would make him go, it would only be kind of you. You see we want everybody we know, so that we may he sure to make the square dances only of our own people, and not to see anything of anybody the Postiches may have asked themselves Little Dickie Dorrian, who’s managing it all, said to the woman Postiche, I’ll bring the English division if you’ll spend enough on the cotillon toys; but I won’t undertake the Italians.’ Now if Della Rocca—”
“Would you want a new dress, Mila?” said the Lady Hilda; “I am sure you must if you’re going to a woman you can’t know the next day.”