Seven Gothic Tales (27 page)

“Signore,” he said, “you have been the witness of a quarrel between myself and my friend, the Prince Pozentiani, whom I shall have to give satisfaction. Will you, as a nobleman, show me the favor of acting as my second tomorrow morning? I am Giovanni Gastone, of Tuscany, at your service.” Augustus told the Prince that he had never had anything to do with a duel and the idea now made him uneasy.

“I should be glad to be of assistance to you,” he said, “but I cannot help thinking that it would be better to settle such a quarrel, between friends and over a supper table, in a friendly way, and that you cannot have any wish to fight a man so much older than yourself over nothing.”

Giovanni smiled very sweetly at him. “Set your conscience at rest, Count,” he said, “the Prince is the affronted party and will choose the weapons. If you had lived in Tuscany you would have heard something of his shooting. As to his being old, it is true that he has lived for twice as many years as either you or I, but for all that he is in himself a child compared to any of us. It will be as natural to him to live for two hundred years as for us to live sixty. The things that wear us down do not touch him. He is very wonderful.”

“What you have said,” Augustus replied, “does not seem to me to make your duel more reasonable. Might he not then kill you?”

“No, no,” said the young man, “but he has been my best friend for many years. We want to find out which of us does really stand best with God.”

The low and clear cry of a bird sounded from the garden, like the voice of the night itself. “Do you hear the aziola cry?” asked Giovanni. “That used to mean that something fortunate was going to happen to me. I do not know,” he added after a while, “what it
would be now, unless God has very much more power of imagination than I myself have—that is, unless he is very much more like my friend the Prince than he is like me. But that, of course, I trust him to be.” He sat in thought for some time. “Those horses which I bought—” he said, “I have not yet given them names. The Prince, now, could so easily have found names for them. Can you think of any?”

As the young Prince had, with repeated thanks, said good night to his second and left him, the old servant whom he had seen in the phaeton came up behind Augustus, noiseless as a cat, and touched his sleeve. His mistress, he said, had been disturbed by the noises in the house and wished the Count to tell her what was happening. She was, in fact, waiting for him at the end of the house, where the light from a window fell out upon a stone seat. The old servant remained in attendance, near a large tree a little way off.

Augustus hesitated to inform the young lady of the duel, but he found that she knew all about it already, her old major-domo having, with the host of the inn, been listening outside the door. What she wanted to know, and seemed in a highly excited state about, was how the quarrel had arisen. Augustus thought that he might as well tell her, in case there should be an inquest later on, so declaring that he was himself quite unable to see how it could have brought on a fight of life and death, he repeated to her as much of the conversation of the supper party as he could remember. She listened to him without a word, standing as still and erect as a statue, but in the midst of the narrative she took hold of his arm and led him into the circle of light. When he had finished she begged him to tell her the old Prince’s story of the bravo all over again, and stopped him to have certain words and figures repeated to her.

As he came to the end the second time she suddenly turned toward the light, and he was startled to see in her face, as if reflected within a mirror, the expression in the face of the old Prince when he had been so deeply insulted. She did not use either powder or paint, so that he could follow the course of her blood as it slowly rose to her forehead until her whole face glowed as from violent exercise or strong wine. In a lighter manner—since she did not carry any of his weight, either physically or morally—she partook at this moment of his divine metamorphosis, and might well have passed, in the train of that old Dionysus, for a young bacchante, or possibly, with the light in her big eyes, for one of his panthers.

She drew her breath deeply. “From the moment I first saw you, Signore,” she said, “I knew that something fortunate was going to happen to me. Please tell me now: Is it possible, if they both fire at the same moment, and both take good aim, that the two bullets would hit their hearts at the same instant and that they would both be killed?”

Augustus thought this young lady to be, for a student of the stars and of philosophy, of a sanguinary turn of mind. “I have never heard of such a thing happening,” he said, “though I cannot say that it would not be possible. I am myself uneasy about the result of this duel, and it is a strange coincidence that I should have been told, only yesterday, of this old Prince being such a deadly shot.”

“Everybody knows that,” she said, “if he cannot frighten people in any other way, he frightens them with his pistols. But kindly tell me, Signore,” she went on, “who is the young man whom the old Prince is going to kill? You did not tell me his name.” Augustus told her. Again she stood silent and very quiet. “Giovanni Gastone,” she repeated slowly, “then I have myself seen him. On the day of my first communion, five years ago, he accompanied his grandmother to the basilica, and held his umbrella over her from her carriage to the porch, for it was raining heavily.”

“Let them go to bed,” she said after a little while. “If this is to be the last night he will ever go to bed, let him sleep. But we, Signore, cannot possibly sleep, and what are we to do? My servant tells me that there is a marionette company at the inn, and as the wagoners from Pisa come back late, they are giving a performance within this hour. Let us go and see them.”

Augustus felt himself that he was not likely to sleep. In fact, he had not often been more wide awake or more pleasantly so. He felt his own body lighter, as when he had been a boy. With the happy wonder of a searcher for gold who strikes a vein of the metal in the rock, he reflected that he had come upon a vein of events in life. The company of the girl also pleased him in a particular way, and he was thinking whether it might not be, partly, because she was dressed like himself in those long black trousers which seemed to him the normal costume for a human being. The fluffs and trains with which women in general accentuate their femininity are bound, he thought, to make talking with them much like conversation with officers in uniform or clergymen in their robes, neither of which you are likely to get much out of. He followed her into the large whitewashed barn where the theater had been erected and the play had just started.

The air in there was hot and stifling, though high up in the roof a window had been opened to the powder-blue nocturnal sky. The building was half filled with people and very dimly lighted by some old lanterns which hung from the ceiling. Around the stage itself the candles of the footlights were creating a magic oasis of light, and making the crimson, orange and bright green of the puppets’ little costumes, probably faded and dull in the daylight, shine and glow like jewels. Their shadows, much larger than themselves, reflected all their movements upon the white cloth of the back-curtain.

The performer stopped his speech upon the arrival of the distinguished spectators, and brought them two armchairs to sit in near the stage, in front of the audience. Then he took up the thread
where he had interrupted it, speaking loudly in the various voices of his characters.

The play which was being acted was the immortal
Revenge of Truth
, that most charming of marionette comedies. Everybody will remember how the plot is created by a witch pronouncing, upon the house wherein all the characters are collected, a curse to the effect that any lie told within it will become true. Thus the mercenary young woman who tries to catch a rich husband by making him believe that she loves him, does fall in love with him; the braggart becomes a hero; the hypocrites finish by becoming really virtuous; the old miser who tells people that he is poor loses all his money. When the women are alone they speak in verse, but the language of the men is very coarse in parts; only a young boy, the one innocent person in the comedy, has some very fine songs which are accompanied by a mandolin behind the stage.

The moral of the play pleased the audience, and their tired, dusty faces lighted up as they laughed at Mopsus, the clown. The girl followed the development of the plot in the spirit of a fellow author. Augustus felt, in his present mood, some of the speeches go strangely to his heart. When the lover says to his mistress that a piece of dry bread satiates one’s hunger better than a whole cookery book, he took it, somehow, as advice to himself. The unsuspecting victim discourses to his intended murderer upon the loveliness of the moonlight, and the villain answers by lecturing on the absurdity of the power of God to make us delight in things which are of no advantage whatever to us, which may even be quite the contrary; and he goes on saying that God therefore likes us in the same way as we like our dogs: because when he is in high spirits, we are in high spirits; and when he is depressed, we are depressed; and when he, in a romantic mood, makes the moonlight night, we trot at his heels as well as we can. This made Augustus smile. He thought that he would like to feel once more, as when he was a child, like one of the dogs of God.

At the end the witch appears again, and on being asked what is really the truth, answers: “The truth, my children, is that we are, all of us, acting in a marionette comedy. What is important more than anything else in a marionette comedy, is keeping the ideas of the author clear. This is the real happiness of life, and now that I have at last come into a marionette play, I will never go out of it again. But you, my fellow actors, keep the ideas of the author clear. Aye, drive them to their utmost consequences.” This speech seemed to him suddenly to hold a lot of truth. Yes, he thought, if my life were only a marionette comedy in which I had my part and knew it well, then it might be very easy and sweet. The people of this country seemed, somehow, to be practicing this ideal. They were as immune to the terrors, the crimes and miracles of the life in which they took part as were the little actors upon the old player’s stage. To the people of the North the strong agitations of the soul come each time as a strange thing, and when they are in a state of excitement their speech comes by fits and starts. But these people spoke fluently under the wildest passions, as if life were, in any of her whims, a comedy which they had already rehearsed. If I have now at last, he thought, come into a marionette play, I will not go out of it again.

During the last scene, when all the puppets were on the stage to receive the applause of the house, Augustus heard a door open at the back of the room, and on turning saw the Prince Giovanni and his servant come in and look around the audience as if searching for somebody. As he thought that they might be looking for him, he went up to them, a little away from the noise of the theater. He felt somehow shy for having gone away to amuse himself on what might be the last night of this young man’s life, but Giovanni did not appear to be surprised, and asked if the play had been good. “An unfortunate thing has happened,” he said. “The young friend of the Prince, who was to have been his second, has been taken with fits. He is very sick and cannot stop crying. I remembered having seen you, in the evening, in the company of a
boy whom I took, from your manner toward him, to be a young gentleman of high rank, perhaps from your own country. I came to beg you to make him take the part of second tomorrow morning, for neither the Prince nor I wish the affair delayed.”

The speech of the Prince brought Augustus into a dilemma. He did not want to give away the young lady’s secret, and reflected that he had perhaps better let Giovanni remain in the belief that she was really a boy of his own country, of whom he was somehow in charge. “This young gentleman,” he said, “seems to me to be very young to take part in so sinister an affair. But as he is here with me, if you will wait I will go and speak with him.”

As he came back to the young lady she was still looking at the stage, but just then the curtain went down for the last time. He repeated to her his conversation with the Prince and suggested that they should find some excuse which would enable her to get away early in the morning, so that she might keep out of the affair. She thought this over for a moment, and got up and looked at Giovanni, who was himself, from the other end of the room, looking at her and Augustus.

“Signore,” she said slowly and gravely, “I wish to meet your friend the Prince Nino, and nothing could give me greater pleasure than to be a second at this duel. Our families have never been friendly to one another, but in an affair of honor it is a duty to disregard any matters of the past. Have the goodness to tell him that my name is Daniele delle Gherardesci, and that I am at his service.”

Prince Giovanni, seeing them looking at him, came up to them, and as Augustus introduced them to each other the young people exchanged a greeting of extreme politeness. She was standing with her back to the stage, and the footlights of the theater made a halo around her head, so that in her easy and arrogant attitude she looked like a young saint masquerading as a dandy. The people in the audience, who had been getting up, on recognizing the Prince stopped to look at him, holding back a little from the group.

The Prince expressed his gratitude for the courtesy shown to him. “Sir,” said the girl, “in Egypt, when she was an old lady and he prime minister, Potiphar’s wife once obtained an audience with Joseph to ask him for the high order, the star of paradise, for her son-in-law. ‘I much dislike being exacting,’ she said, ‘still, I feel that it is now such a long time since I asked Your Excellency for anything that I hope that you will lend me a favorable ear.’

“ ‘Madame,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘once upon a time I happened to be in a prison. There I could not see the stars, but I used to dream about them. I dreamed that because I could not watch them they were running wild all over heaven, and the shepherds and the camelherds driving their flocks at night would lose their way. I even once dreamed about you, Madame, and that when I found the star Aldebaran fallen from the sky, I picked it up and gave it to you. You pinned it in your fichu and said: “A thousand thanks, Joseph.” I am glad that my dream has more or less come true. The order which you want for your son-in-law is already his.’ “