“It is not trained, you mean?”
What Elliot meant was that it never would be trained, Julian being not a chorister, but Lord Linchcombe.
“I am a mere dilettante, Madam,” said Elliot, “and I speak without authority.”
But dilettantes are of two kinds. One kind believes that the amateur, free from the necessity to practise the tricks of the trade, has thereby a superiority with which the professional cannot cope; the other that the pursuit of perfect command can only be obtained by the incessant concentration of the professional. Mr. Elliot belonged to the latter kind.
“Julian has a lovely voice. It is moving. In a room it can provoke tears. Believe me who have heard it! But of course it has not the volume of the great singers, it cannot swell and diminish on a sustained note like an organ; and of course in a few years it may be nothing at all — a pleasant compliment to his guests at an evening assembly in his house.”
Lady Frances was listening carefully to his words. It seemed to Elliot that she was in some way relieved by them. He understood hers too, or thought that he did. Julian would have work for which he must fit himself, sterner work, work dealing with the management of estates and the government of the realm. Music, singing? So many decorations, charming, enervating, perhaps, ample enough to occupy the life of Mr. James Elliot, but pure waste for the chief of a great Whig family with — how many was it? — a dozen pocket boroughs to echo his politics. Lady Frances nodded her head.
“I am glad to hear you say so. I had a fear last night that I had left a great gift to tend itself more than Julian’s father would have done, a plant unwatered as no doubt our good vicar would have said. For Julian sang last night and in this town, where the best singers in the world are familiar to the ear, and a crowd gathered.”
“Madam, you could gather a crowd in Naples with a cracked accordion.”
“But it would laugh and go on. It would not stay, planted there,” and she pointed her finger to the roadway beneath them. “It would not demand an encore.”
“And yet, Madam,” said Elliot with a laugh, “not one of that crowd to-day would do more than say, ‘Last night I heard a pretty voice from the first floor apartment of the Inn of “The Golden Ox,” and to-morrow it would not even be remembered.”
He heard his companion draw a long breath. For these words then she had waited. So great was her relief that she must needs hear them again. With a bubble of joy she cried:
“It would not be remembered?”
“Neither the song nor the singer.”
“It would not,” and she sought for a word, “it would not be recognized — after a time — as something once heard from the first floor of...” and she stopped rather suddenly as though some new question had slipped in amongst the others to trouble her.
“No, indeed,” said Mr. Elliot a little puzzled by the lady’s insistence. “It would be lost amongst the recollections of a thousand voices.”
“You speak as if you yourself had heard Julian last night,” she said rather sharply.
“But I did. My carriage, I am afraid, for a moment scattered his audience.”
Lady Frances recoiled. Elliot could think of no other word for that swift startled movement. Uneasiness began once more to take hold of him. He looked forward over the Bay, trying to set a cause to it; and he heard her asking him in a voice he hardly recognized, and with an effort at carelessness which he did.
“So you are staying at ‘The Golden Ox’? I imagined that you kept always an apartment in the town.”
“Oh, no, Lady Frances,” he answered with a smile, still occupied with his puzzle, “I am lodged above you. See!” and he turned and pointed upwards to the windows of his room.
“There?”
Some queer sound as though the little trivial word was strangled in her throat made Mr. Elliot turn his head quickly towards her. He met the same bleak, hard indecipherable stare which had once before startled him at Grest. But it did more than startle him now. It frightened him and he had a suspicion now that it was really fear which he had felt at Grest. So utterly did that look change her, make a stranger of her, strip her of all her friendliness, of the polite and engaging ways which went with her dress and the tiring of her hair. She was plucked out of her century, she became — primaeval. Just for a flash it lasted. She rose and as she rose, Elliot remembered, without so far as he could see any reason why he should remember, the omitted lines which he had restored to his written account of the dialogue exchanged on this balcony the night before.
“Not unless there is something you have planned of which you have never told me.”
“No! Henry! How could there be anything?”
It was Henry who brought the conversation to an end. He came out upon the balcony looking for Lady Frances.
“You are there?” His eyes lit upon Mr. Elliot none too pleasantly; and he glanced from him to his cousin.
“My dear,” he said reproachfully, “your guests are waiting.”
She followed Henry back into the room and made her apologies. Mr. Elliot saw Julian in front of him, rather shy and very dignified.
“I have grown?” Julian confided hopefully as he shook Elliot by the hand.
“A young giant.”
The boy had grown, certainly, and he blushed with pleasure at its recognition. He was dressed, too, to make the most of his new inches. His brown hair was drawn back with a blue ribbon. He wore a great cambric bow at his throat and lace ruffles at his wrists. A coat of navy blue embroidered with gold and a white satin waistcoat set off his figure.
“Admiral Timbertoes, bless me if it isn’t,” said Elliot shaking the boy’s hand, “but I see you haven’t lost it yet.” He looked down upon a slim pair of legs as straight as the box trees in his garden at Grest, sheathed in white satin breeches and silk stockings and finished off with small polished shoes with red heels and gold buckles.
“I hear, Sir, that you were sailing your frigate in the bay this morning.”
Julian laughed delightedly.
“I held the rudder. It jumped against me. It was glorious.”
Folding doors were thrown back. A major-domo appeared with a gold aiguillette across his chest.
“Your Ladyship is served.”
A look of disappointment clouded the boy’s face.
“You are not hungry?” cried Mr. Elliot in alarm. “That will never do. You must go to bed.”
Julian laughed.
“Oh, I’m hungry. I could eat a sheep. But I wanted to sit next to you.”
“That was charming of you,” Elliot returned. “But the ladies have a prior claim upon your society.”
The cloud of disappointment still remained.
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Elliot,” Julian said gravely, “I am not very interested in ladies.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Well, take heart! That will come later on and, let us hope, before the wooden leg.”
“You see, they talk of such silly things.”
“Not ships, for instance?” said Mr. Elliot.
“No, nor of miracles,” and the boy’s face lit up. His eyes danced. “I am going to see the miracle at the Duomo.”
“San Januarius?”
“Yes. I hoped that you would tell me all about it first. I am going with our courier Domenico.” And he added, “I do hope we shan’t sit long over dinner.”
“It doesn’t happen till the evening,” said Elliot.
“I know. But I want to get close. I want to see it really happen.”
But at that moment the party began to move in due order into the dining-room and no more was said between them. In any case, Mr. Elliot reflected, he could never have hoped to dissuade an eager boy from the spectacle of an actual miracle to take place before his eyes. But wasn’t there some risk? Rossi, the innkeeper, had hinted that there might be, if the miracle were delayed. And Julian meant to get close in the forefront of the crowd. It was true that the courier would be with him, an
d no doubt Lady Frances had assured herself that there was no ground for any fear. Still Mr. Elliot was troubled. But he saw the scarlet sash of the Monsignor in front of him. Perhaps if he were near enough, the Monsignor might have a word to say.
As it happened, the Monsignor had a good deal to say but it was not all in the vein which Mr. Elliot expected or hoped for. Julian was placed at the far end of the table between one woman, fat and maternal, whom Elliot put down as his great-aunt, Lady Fritton, and a pretty Italian woman who had eyes only for Henry. A question asked by the tutor with the horn-rimmed glasses set off the ecclesiastic.
VI. DISQUIETUDE
“WE SHOULD CONSIDER San Januarius the spiritual descendant of Virgil,” Monsignor Vitello Lappa began. “Virgil at Posilippo set up on a rock a bronze archer with the shaft of his arrow drawn back to his ear and the barb pointed at Vesuvius. I need hardly apprise you that the threat of that archer kept the volcano quiet through many generations.”
There were some present at the table who knew Monsignor Lappa to be a distinguished member of the Arcadian Academy who could turn an elegant sonnet and by the easy standard of that institution passed as a wit. The rest merely stared, thinking the statement unusual and still more unusual as coming from a cleric.
“Unfortunately, a peasant,” Lappa continued, without a twitch diminishing the thin severity of his lips, “with the sense of humour so indigenous amongst Neapolitans of the lower kind, one day flighted the arrow and hit the mountain.”
“But — but — Monsignor!”
It was Julian’s tutor who, with a face behind his big spectacles puckered with bewilderment, and an accent you could cut with a knife, interrupted.
“Yes?” Lappa asked.
“A bronze arrow—” stammered the tutor.
“Its weight no doubt kept its direction straight,” aid the ecclesiastic.
“And it struck the mountain, shot from Posilippo?”
“And the impact was at once followed by an eruption of the most terrible character.”
“But surely that was—” the tutor’s manners forbade him to contradict a dignitary of the Church with a red sash about his waist. He caught himself up—” that was — remarkable.”
“Very, very remarkable,” Monsignor Lappa agreed gravely. “But, my dear Doctor, was it any more remarkable than the miracle which our young friend there—” and he waved a shapely white hand towards Julian, “is going to watch this afternoon?”
Doctor Lanford, the tutor, was silenced.
“Obviously,” Lappa resumed, “something had got to be done about it. Virgil was long since dead. No new archer made any difference at all. Not one could quell the angry mountain. The black pall hung over the peak. Molten lava burnt up the fields upon the slopes. Vast masses of stones, causing a great mortality, were flung into the air. Archers were under a cloud, the Vesuvius cloud. Oh, clearly something had to be done. And in the great amphitheatre of Pozzuoli — the Virgil country as you will notice — something was done. San Januarius, during the persecutions of Diocletian, was there thrown to the lions — who at once lay down at his feet.”
“Really! Really!” exclaimed Dr. Lanford, helping himself to a pinch of snuff.
“This pleasant variation from those animals’ usual behaviour in an arena,” Monsignor Lappa continued smoothly, “marked out San Januarius as Virgil’s successor. A Bishop — for San Januarius was a Bishop — at whose feet lions ceased in a moment to feel hunger, was obviously the man to quell the anger of Vesuvius.
None the less, the savage Praetorian Timotheus, who had learned no compassion from the lions, cut his head off. A saintly woman happened to be present and in more senses than one kept her head.”
Henry Scoble chuckled, one or two devout ladies looked shocked, and the rest, who had no doubt met other clerics of the same sceptical character, were amused. The one man who neither smiled nor relaxed the austerity of his face was the Monsignor.
“She collected some of the martyr’s blood in a phial. His head was retrieved and encased in a silver bust of the Saint which is kept in a press in the Cathedral. From that point of vantage San Januarius watches over the city. Now it is common for foolish people to ask for a proof; and three times a year, the first Sunday in May being one of the times, the proof is given. The silver bust is brought out on to the porch and at the end of the day, after all the communities have made their processions, the Archbishop leads his. He carries the phial containing the congealed blood of the martyr, and as he holds it on high in the crowded square before the bust, the blood within the phial is seen to melt.”
“And if it didn’t, Monsignor Lappa?” Henry Scoble asked.
Monsignor Lappa’s face assumed an expression of despair.
“We should have to expect calamities such as waited upon Rome when Julius Cæsar fell.”
He recovered himself with a jerk and turning to Henry smiled benevolently.
“But it always does.”
“There have been delays, Monsignor,” said Elliot, speaking for the first time.
“No doubt,” replied Lappa. “A little suspense, a little fear that Naples may have to pay for its sins, may not after all be harmful. In the square before the Duomo, you may see perhaps the women in tears, the men praying fervently and, alas! some of the lazzaroni undutifully abusing the Saint as a yellow-faced old rogue who doesn’t deserve their veneration. But in the end the Saint relents, the congealed blood liquefies, the Archbishop, in the gathering darkness holds the phial aloft, the banners are raised, the trumpets roll, the people fall upon their knees, the tears of woe become tears of joy.”
“But before that happy moment, Monsignor,” Elliot persisted, “is there not an interval of danger?”
“Of danger?” Lappa answered with a hint of disdain in his voice.
“A boy, for instance,” Mr. Elliot stuck to his objection, “probably of another faith and certainly of gentle birth, might he not in an angry and frightened mob run a grave risk?”
Mr. Elliot looked towards Julian as he spoke and met his eyes. They were watching him, wide open and big as on the night at Grest when they had watched him from the bed; and with just the same prayer darkening their blue, as all emotion did, and asking for his silence. It struck Mr. Elliot suddenly as extraordinary that the boy should set such store on witnessing the miracle.
“I shall be so quiet that no one will notice me,” said Julian eagerly. “Besides, I shall have Domenico the courier with me. Oh, I shall be safe!”
Julian spoke in Italian with a purity of accent which quite surprised Monsignor Vitello.
“Nay,” he said with a smile, “if your Lordship speaks so, not the angriest lazzarone amongst the lot will take you for a foreign heretic. You will be not a son of our brown Naples, to be sure, but of some castle in the Apennines.”
“Besides,” Frances Scoble added, “our minister, Sir Edward Place, has written to me that he has a room opposite to the Duomo overlooking the square where Julian will be welcome. So if there is any sign of trouble coming, he has a refuge there.”
Mr. Elliot had no more to say. Certainly Julian spoke the Italian tongue like a native. His father had been particular upon that point as upon no other, so deep had been his love for Italy. At the end of the meal the company returned to the drawing-room in the foreign way. There was no drive to-day for the fine people of Naples in their painted carriages with the running footmen. The processions, which were now returning to their monasteries by other roads than those by which they came, occupied the streets. But on the other hand there was music in the drawing-room with the balcony which overlooked the bay. Barbella, Naples’ most finished violinist, Orgitano at the harpsichord, a mandolin, a French horn and a violoncello made a quintette which for one of that company, at all events, caused time to cease and the world to vanish beyond a golden mist of melody. The shadows indeed were beginning to fall when Mr. Elliot came out from his dreams. He was in the mood to expect visions and marvels. Music half opened a door and raised
the edge of a curtain for him upon an unknown, entrancing world, so unearthly that he could never describe it, never be more than exquisitely aware of it waiting, a world of delicate, lucent air and colours more lovely than eyes have ever seen. The door was slowly shutting upon him now, the edge of the curtain swinging slowly back into its place, when he saw across the room in that magic doorway the boy Julian Linchcombe standing like some beautiful page who held the keys of entrance.
Julian was standing actually in the doorway of the room with a cloak across his arm and his three-cornered hat under it. A concerto by Niccolo Jommelli was being played and as the boy stood listening with a smile of expectation upon his parted lips, it seemed to Elliot that the melody, which now soared into a cry of passion, now swooned through cadences of moving appeal, was trying to tell him of great overwhelming changes impending over him, as though for him too the doorway was to lead into a new world where all was strange, and whence he was never to return.
But although this message was loud to Elliot’s ears, not a whisper of it, clearly, had reached Julian. He was waiting for the concerto to end, and as soon as the applause died away he crossed the room to his half-sister.
“I am going,” he said. “Domenico is waiting for me downstairs.”
“Very well.”
Frances Scoble walked with the boy to the door. He was to be careful in what he said, not to laugh, and at the first sign of any trouble to seek the shelter of the Minister’s room over the square.
“And wear your cloak, Julian,” Elliot heard her say at the doorway. “It will hide your dress and at the same time protect your throat. Let me see you put it on!”
Gould anyone have been more thoughtful, more kind? Frances was outside the door now, but Elliot could see her and Julian. He swung the cloak over his shoulders. It hung down to his ankles and he hooked it across his chest with a chain. But Frances was not satisfied. She drew the edges close beneath his chin and taking a brooch from her dress pinned them together. The brooch flashed and sparkled as she pinned it and Elliot wished that it had been less noticeable and costly. But they made a pretty picture framed in the doorway, the young guardian fussing over her ward, lest he should catch some trumpery cold, and the young ward eager to be off upon his adventure. Mr. Elliot sauntered out on to the balcony a minute afterwards and watched Julian and the courier walk away from the inn. He remembered Domenico, a sleek, smooth fellow and competent, who had been courier to the boy’s father before him. That recollection pleased Elliot. Domenico would have a sort of lineal interest in his charge; and suddenly Elliot asked himself a question.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 731