Seven Gothic Tales (29 page)

There was a long and deep silence. She might have been a little statue in the garden, except for the light morning wind playing with and lifting her soft locks.

“I had left you,” he said, speaking altogether like a person in a dream, “and was going away, but I turned back at the door. You were sitting up in the bed. Your face was in the shadow, but the lamp shone on your shoulders and your back. You were naked, for I had torn off your clothes. The bed had green and golden curtains, like my forests in the mountains, and you were like my picture of Daphne, who turns away and is changed into a laurel. And I was standing in the dark. Then the clock struck one. For a year,” he cried, “I have thought of nothing but that one moment.”

Again the two young people stood quite still. Like the marionettes of the night before, they were within stronger hands than their own, and had no idea what was going to happen to them. He spoke again:

He stopped because, though he had repeated these lines to himself many times, at the moment he could not remember any more. It was as if he might have dropped down dead, like his old adversary.

She turned again and looked at him, very severely, and yet her face expressed the clearness and calm which the sound of poetry
produces in the people who love it. She spoke very slowly to him, in her clear and sweet voice, like a bird’s:

She looked away for a moment, drew a deep breath, and her voice took on more force.

With these words she walked away, and though she passed so near to him that he might have held her back by stretching out his hand, he did not move or try to touch her, but stood upon the same spot as if he intended to remain there forever, and followed her with his eyes as she walked up to the house.

Augustus came out of the door at that same moment, and walked up to meet her. Though he was deeply affected by the happenings of the morning, and last of all by the sight of the old Prince, now lying in peace and dignity on a large bed within the inn, his conscience told him that he ought to make an effort to get the message of the old lady to Pisa, and he wanted the girl to help him and guide him there. At the same time he was, now that he understood more of the whole affair which had brought on the morning’s tragedy, shy of approaching her, as one of the principal figures in it, and talking to her of such trivial matters as roads and coaches. She met him, however, as if he had been an old friend whom she was happy to meet again. She took his hand and looked at him. She was changed, like a statute come to life, he thought.

She listened with great interest to all he had to tell her, and was naturally eager to bring the message to her friend as soon as possible. She suggested that they travel together in her phaëton, which
would be quicker than his coach. She told him that she would drive it herself.

“My friend,” she said, “let us go away. Let us go to Pisa as quickly as we can. For I am free. I can choose where I will go, I can think of tomorrow. I think that tomorrow is going to be lovely. I can remember that I am seventeen, and that by the mercy of God I have sixty years more to live. I am no more shut up within one hour. God!” she said with a sudden deep shudder, “I cannot remember it now if I try.”

She looked like a young charioteer who is confident of winning his race. It was clear that the idea of speed was at this moment the most attractive of all ideas to her. As they were going into the house she looked back at the terrace.

“We have all been wrong,” she said. “That old man was great and might well have been loved. While he was alive we wished for his death, but now that he is dead I think that we all wish that he were back.”

“That,” said Augustus, who had been reflecting upon his own life, “may make us realize that every human being whom we meet and get to know is, after all, something in our minds, like a tree planted in our gardens or a piece of furniture within our house. It may be better to keep them and try to put them to some use, than to cast them away and have nothing at all there in the end.” She thought of this for a little while. “Then the old Prince shall be,” said she, “within the garden of my mind a great fountain, made of black marble, near which it is always cool and fresh, and from which great cascades of water are rushing and playing. I shall go and sit there sometimes, when I have much to think of. If I had been Rosina I would not have tried to get away from him. I would have made him happy. It would have been good if he had been happy; it is hard to make anybody unhappy.”

Augustus, who thought he heard the note of a late regret in her voice, said in order to console her: “Remember now that you have saved the other’s life.” She changed color and was silent for a
moment. Then she turned and looked at him with deep serenity. “Who,” she said, “would have stood by and heard a man so unjustly accused?”

As soon as her carriage was ready they started for Pisa and went at a great speed. The day was beginning to get warm, the road was dusty, and the shadows of the trees were keeping close underneath them. Augustus had left his address with the old doctor in case there would have to be an inquest, but after all the old Prince had died a natural death.

Count Augustus von Schimmelmann had been staying in Pisa for more than three weeks and had come to like the place. He had had a love affair with a Swedish lady, some years older than himself, who lived in Pisa to keep away from her husband, and had a small opera stage on which she appeared to her friends. She was a disciple of Swedenborg, and told Augustus that she had had a vision of herself and him in the next world. What really interested him more were the attempts of two priests, one old and one young, to convert him to the Church of Rome. He had no intention of joining it, but it surprised and pleased him that anyone should chose to occupy himself so much with his soul, and he took much trouble in explaining to the churchmen his ideas and states of mind. He could, however, foresee that this affair of spiritual seduction could not go on forever, but would, like, worse luck, all affairs of seduction, have to come to an end one way or another, and he had begun to give much of his time to a secret political society to which he had been introduced as coming from a freer country. At their séances he had met one of the genuine old Jacobins, an exile, a former member of the Mountain, who had been a friend of Robespierre. Augustus often visited him in a little dark and dirty room high up in an old house, and discussed tyranny and freedom
with him. He was also taking painting lessons, and had begun to copy an old picture in the gallery.

One day he received a letter from the old Countess di Gampocorta, who was at the time in residence at her villa close to Pisa and asked him to come and see her. She wrote with great friendliness and gratitude and gave him her news. On being informed, at the same moment, of her grandmother’s accident and the death of her former husband, the young Rosina had been brought to bed of a boy, who had been christened Carlo after his great grandmother, and whom she described as a very wonderful baby. Both the old and the young woman were well again, though the old Countess wrote that she had given up all hope of getting back the use of her right hand, and they were longing to express to him their thanks for the service that he had done them in their hour of need.

Augustus drove out to the old lady’s villa on the afternoon of an extremely hot day. As he was nearing the place a thunderstorm which had hung over Pisa for three days broke loose. A strange sulphurous color and smell filled the air, and the large dark trees near the road on which they were driving were bent down by the violent gusts of wind. A few tremendous flashings of lightning seemed to strike quite close to the carriage, and were followed by long wild roarings of thunder. Then came the rain in heavy warm drops, and in a moment the whole landscape was veiled to him, within his covered carriage, behind streaks of gray and luminous water. As they drove over a stone bridge with a low balustrade he saw the rain strike the dark river like many hundred arrowheads. They climbed up a road along a steep and rocky hill, now slippery with the rain, and as they came to a stop at the bottom of a long stone stair in front of the house, a servant with a large umbrella came running down to protect the visitor on his ascent to the house.

In the very large room opening onto a long stone terrace with a view over the river, the quick drumming of heavy raindrops upon
the stones was as distinct as if it had been in the room itself. With it came, through the tall open windows, the smell of the sudden freshness and moisture of the air, and of hot stones cooling under water. The room itself smelled of roses. At the other end of it an old
abbate
had been giving a little girl a lesson on the piano, but they had stopped because the noise of the thunder and rain interfered with their counting their measures, and they were now looking out over the valley and the river.

The old Countess and the young mother, on a sofa, had had the baby brought in to look at. He was in the arms of his nurse, a very large magnificent young woman in pink and red, like an oleander flower, and there looked fantastically small, like a little roasted apple to which had been attached a great stream of lace and ribbons. Their attention was divided between the child and the storm, and the two had brought them into a state of exultation, as if their lives had at this hour reached their zenith.

The old lady, who had meant to get up to meet him, was so overcome with her feelings at the sight of Augustus that she could not move. Her eyes, under the old eyelids that were like crape, filled with tears, which from time to time during their conversation rolled down her face. She kissed him on both cheeks, and introduced him with deep emotion to her granddaughter, who was in reality as lovely as any Madonna he had seen in Italy, and to the baby. Augustus had never been able to feel anything but fear in the presence of very young children—though they might, he thought, be of some interest as a kind of promise—and he was surprised to realize that the women were all of the opinion that the baby at this stage had reached its very acme of perfection, and that it was a tragic thing that it should ever have to change. This view, that the human race culminates at birth to decline ever after, impressed him as being easier to live up to than his own.

The old lady had changed since the day when he had met her on the road. The love for a male creature, which she had told him that she had thus far been unable to feel, had rounded out her
life in a great and sweet harmony. She told him so herself in the course of their talk. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I was told never to show a fool a thing half finished. But what else does the Lord himself do to us during all our lives? If I had been shown this child from the beginning I should have been docile and have let the Lord ride me in any direction he wanted. Life is a mosaic work of the Lord’s, which he keeps filling in bit by bit. If I had seen this little bit of bright color as the centerpiece, I would have understood the pattern, and would not have shaken it all to pieces so many times, and given the good Lord so much trouble in putting it together again.” Otherwise she talked mostly about her accident and the afternoon that they had spent together at the inn. She talked with that great delight in remembering which gives value to any occurrence of the past, however insignificant it may have been at the moment.

A servant brought wine and some very beautiful peaches, and the young father came in and was introduced to the guest; but he played no greater part in the picture than the youngest Magus of the adoration, the old Countess having taken for herself the part of Joseph.

When the rain had eased off the old lady took Augustus to the window to see the view. “My friend,” she said, while they were standing there together, a little away from the others, “I can never rightly express my gratitude to you, but I want to give you a small token of it to remember me by, when you are far away, and I hope that you will give me the pleasure of accepting it.”

Augustus was looking out at the landscape below. A vaguely familiar note within it struck him and made him feel slightly giddy.

“When we first met,” she went on, “I told you that I had loved three persons in the course of my life. About the two you know. The third and first was a girl of my own age, a friend from a far country, whom I knew for a short time only and then lost. But we had promised to remember each other forever, and the
memory of her has given me strength many times in the vicissitudes of life. When we parted, with many tears, we gave each other a gift of remembrance. Because this thing is precious to me and a token of a real friendship, I want you to take it with you.”

With these words she took from her pocket a small object and handed it to him.

Augustus looked at it, and unconsciously his hand went up to his breast. It was a small smelling-bottle in the shape of a heart. On it was painted a landscape with trees, and in the background a white house. As he gazed at it he realized that the house was his own place in Denmark. He recognized the high roof of Lindenburg, even the two old oaks in front of the gate, and the long line of the lime-tree avenue behind the house. The stone seat under the oaks had been painted with great care. Underneath, on a painted ribbon, were the words
Amitié sincère
.