TRISTAN LE RODEUR

Índice Geral das Seções Índice da Seção Atual Indice da Obra Atual Anterior: XII - “Faust and Marguerite” Seguinte: XIV - She looked at him as one who awakes, the past was a sleep, and her life began

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CAPÍTULO XIII

TRISTAN LE RODEUR

I AM not going to describe the Eternal City. Most people have personal remiscences of it, and stereoscopic views in abundance of its antiquities, pleasures, and palaces; everybody is at least tolerably well acquainted with its topography and characteristics, whether their information on the subject be derived from the conversation of travelled friends, newspaper articles, Childe Harold, or Murray’s Hand Book.

There was a fine September glow of approaching sunset over the City of the Seven Hills, streaming with blinding radiance down its narrow dirty, picturesque streets, overlaying its grimy basilica roofs with yellow flame dazzling the eyes of the staring lazzaroni at the comers of the courts, and rejoicing the late autumnal flies congregated about the open sweetmeat and fruit stalls in the market-place of the Piazza Navona.

Past the great fountains of this identical piazza, with the light of the sunset behind her, came a certain woman, unattended, and habited in grave colors of no very remarkable fashion, but whose perfect step and graceful bearing distinguished her at once from the crowd of ordinary street pedestrians, and attracted the attention of more than one person who chanced to come in her way. She walked swiftly, being admonished thereto, perhaps, by the lateness of the hour, but her pallid face, which was not so closely veiled as to be wholly concealed, displayed such evident tokens of recent weeping that it might easily be perceived she had lately quitted a scene of distress or emotion. And her eyes, regardless alike of the moving throng through which she passed, and of the blinding sunset glare, seemed abstractedly rivetted upon some mental picture. Out of the busy luminous Piazza Navona she turned with the same quick step into the shadow of the long Via del Strofa, winding her way among the loiterers and the garrulous contadine who stood chatting here and there

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with their wandering acquaintances, thence into the Via del Fontana, and so at last to the Piazza del Spagna, head centre and favourite promenade of aristocratic and fashionable foreigners in Rome. There with slackened footsteps, she entered its chief hotel, and passed into a handsome room on the first floor, one of a suite rich in mirrors, ormolu, thick velvet-piled carpets, and all the characteristics of that heavy detailess style which distinguishes the state apartments of a “grand hotel.”

In the embrasure of a window at the further end of the saloon sat Ella Cairnsmuir – a beam of mellow dusty sunlight full on the pages of a volume she held; and on the brown shapely head that was bent over it, making gold threads among the sober coils of smooth hair, and touching with rosy glory the pale oval face whose “sweetness and light” were always the better part of its beauty. But when that soft footfall crossed the threshold of the great silent room, Ella laid her book aside, and looking up through the sunlight at the new comer, said blithely:

“Well, mamma, returned at last? Why would you walk? I am sure you are very tried! And that dreadful lava pavement! It is quite two hours since you went out!”

My Lady removed her veil, turning her face away from Ella, and for a moment made no reply, but when at length she spoke, the tone of her voice in which natural agitation, at war with enforced serenity, produced a strange discordance, piqued the curiosity and moved the concern of the younger woman.

“Indeed, Ella, I prefer a walk sometimes. It is a novelty to me after so much driving at home. And I have visited such a very old-fashioned part of the city this afternoon. You would like to see it.”

“Where is that, mamma?”

“Up the Rione Ponte. I called upon an artist whom I know there, and have been entertained in his studio for some time.”

“Not a very fashionable quarter for an artist, is it? But I did not know you had any acquaintances in the profession at Rome, mamma.”

“No,” returned Lady Cairnsmuir, facing her daughter for the first time during their conversation, and speaking with perfect ease and composure:

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“the artist I visited to-day” is not one whom I am accustomed to mention because he is very little known, and his fame has yet to be acquired. But that it will be acquired some day,” she added warmly, “everybody who may chance to see his paintings now must readily admit.”

“I suppose he is a young man, mamma?”

“Scarcely twenty. But he looks so much older than an Englishman would at that age, that I daresay you would take him to be little less than thirty, and his thoughtful face and reflective habits help to bear out the illusion.”

“You know all about him, then, mamma. Have I ever heard his name?”

“I think not. It is Tristan Le Rodeur.”

“What an ashen shadow that was that blanched my Lady’s serene features as she uttered these last words! One might fancy such a change in the face of a soldier’s widow naming the battle in which her husband fell, or such a look in the eyes of a dead sailor’s mother speaking of the ship in which her darling went down! A touch, too, of romance in the name itself that might make one suspect it had not been bestowed by birth but by design. It carried with it a jingle of poetry that struck the ear of Lady Ella pleasantly.

“What a beautiful name, mamma! But it is French, not Italian.”

“His father was a Parisian, though the boy himself is Roman – by adoption. He is an orphan.”

How my Lady’s heart beat as she spoke! One might really have heard it in the momentary pause that followed her last words.

“Mamma, I should like to see him.”

“I intend that you should, my dear. In fact, I have gone so far as to promise that we will visit his studio together to-morrow afternoon. I believe you have no engagement that can hinder such an arrangement?”

And Lady Cairnsmuir having received her daughter’s brief reply in the negative, floated out of the room into her own apartment, and there remained sub silentio until dinner time.

But in the interim Ella was full of speculation and impatience.

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Accustomed as she was to the inflexible composure of her mother’s manner, and the immobility of her suave countenance, it was not possible that the unusual emotion Lady Cairnsmuir had betrayed when naming this fancifully christened stranger, could escape her daughters notice.

Mystery had an attraction for Ella, beyond that which it posseses for most persons, and so much knowledge as she had acquired concerning the uncommon fortunes of her family – especially on the distaff side – disposed her imagination to dwell with peculiar attention and lingering curiosity upon any circumstance which appeared to interest either of her parents.

But conjecture was so plainly at fault regarding this young genius with the dolorous name – suggestive though the name might be of strange adventure, long wanderings, melancholy destiny and enforced exile, that Ella concluded against present calculations as premature, and resolved to suspend her inquiries until she should have gathered something further to the point from her mother’s conversation that evening.

But in this anticipation she was disappointed, for the Countess did not utter another word on the topic that absorbed Ella’s thoughts, and this singular avoidance of a subject that had moved her to weeping a few hours since, appeared the more intentional and studied because my Lady evinced greater brilliance and liveliness than usual upon other matters of ordinary commonplace; which Ella observing, refrained from the questions her desire might have prompted had Lady Cairnsmuir behaved with accustomed indifference and taciturnity. There was a change in her mother, whether pleasing or the reverse, Ella could not satisfactorily determine; but that it was connected in some manner, yet unexplained, with the mysterious wanderer, she did not doubt. To-morrow, then, might solve the enigma. Alas, she did not guess that morrow was pregnant with the greatest event of her own life, or that the secret she longed to explore was big with such deep significance to herself as no subsequent experience of the years before her should be able to cancel, or sink into unimportance! The Eternal City was indeed destined to be a singularly fatal place to her Ladyship’s unfortunate house!

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So the shadows of that gruesome September night fell upon Rome blackening the tall outlines of basilicas, domes and towers, shrouding the diaphonous waters of the magic Fontana di Trevi, wherein Corinne beheld the image of her beloved, and breathing, like that ancient darkness which could be felt, beneath the ponderous arches of the ruined Colosseum, in the midst of whose vast arena the white witching moonlight lay like a sheeny spell of silence and repose, where once the “Ave” of the gladiators shook the steamy perfumed air, and the imperial eyes of a Faustina gleamed upon the splendour of Death.

Outside the City of the Cæsars the shadows slept upon the “waste and solitary” heights of the spectral Alban hills, and gathered thickly across the lonely Campagna, and its tangled wilderness of myrtle, wild olive, ilex and bay, sown there broadcast by the bounteous hand of the errant wind, that old unsettled Vagabond of the ages, that Prototype of wanderers that only exists in creating and renewing, that flits, and shifts and flames, and broods continually over the face of the whole broad world, the nomad Spirit of action and power, the very pulse and breath of the great Pan, the never wearying Intercessor between Earth and Heaven.

How blithely and turbulently it had gambolled, and laughed, and shouted in the dawn of that September morning, twenty years ago, when the heir of Kelpies went out as a fugitive from his father’s house, the self-condemned murderer of his younger brother’s fortune, – exiled, like another Cain, from the home where his presence was a curse and a malison!

How softly and delicately it sighed and floated, – the selfsame autumn wind, – through the long moonlit hours of this other September night, about the casement of My Lady’s chamber in the Grand Hotel of the Paizza del Spagna, creeping so daintly round the curved pilasters of the balcony, that no sound followed the soft ghostly step; or now and then murmuring with invisible lips through the crevices of the lattice, in short thin tones, subdued and thrilling, like voices that whisper before a death.

Before a death. For this low-breathed wind brought its message to My Lady’s couch that night, as it brings tidings to the ship becalmed in

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the midst of the sea, when all things look fair and full of repose, and the heavens hang blue and cloudless overhead, and the water lies smooth as glass beneath the prow. But the sailors know the meaning of the little throbbing puffs that presently begin to tap and sough in the cordage and scarce to ruffle the drowsy transparent deep about them. For then they know that the harpies of foul weather are already abroad, and that to windward are storm and hurricane and danger of wreck.