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CAPÍTULO V

 

MORNING LETTERS

 

            MY LADY’S bedchamber in Belgravia. My Lady was a woman of singular taste and much wealth, and there was nothing amiss, nothing wanting in this perfectly appointed room of hers. Through the webby folds of my Lady’s window curtains came the tinted paly light of an early May morning, streaming down along the thick soft carpet upon which no step could ever sound, and kissing its own bright reflection in the tall cheval beside the ormulu cabinet. My Lady’s toilette table was spread with all manner of pretty French bijouterie, dainty perfume caskets, delicate porcelain ornaments designed for a dozen impossible uses, cases of Parisian cosmetiques, hand-mirrors with jewelled and monogramed handles, tiny transparent china-trays, and ringstands of Bohemian glass, that looked as though a touch from any but the fairiest of fingers would destroy their bloom and crush their fragile pedestals.

 

            At the foot of my Lady’s couch there stood a little rosewood table curiously inlaid with ivory, and upon it a vase of embossed silver in which was placed the five-guinea bouquet my Lady had carried the night before to the crush at the Duchess of Hautton’s. But my Lady herself lay dozing out the quiet morning hours among her eider-down pillows, her comely bosom heaving serenely beneath the rich Valenciennes of her night-dress, and the long plaits of her blue-black hair lying unbound about her shapely throat and neck.

 

            Dolores, Countess of Cairnsmuir, had long been held a great beauty among the connoisseurs of the Loudon seasons, but she was past her hey-day now, and her daughter, the Lady Ella, heiress to much wealth, though a salic prohibition barred her accession to the Cairnsmuir title and estate, had been presented last month. It was hardly supposed that she would ever rival her mother’s charms of lovely person and stately presence, yet she was no longer spoken of as a child, but as a woman, and speculations touching

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her matrimonial prospects were already mooted over kettledrums and morning chocolate.

 

            Noiselessly my Lady’s maid came gliding by-and-by into the chamber of her noble mistress with the morning awakener and the results of the early post; and my Lady, turning her drowsy eyes upon the little Sèvres tea-tray as the attendant deposited it on a console by the bedside, wearily bade her return at ten, for she found herself too tired to rise at present. Then, as the door closed softly, the countess lifted her languid head from the pillow and glanced at the envelope of the topmost letter. It bore the “Roma” post-mark, its contents were evidently of bulky dimensions, and the sight of the handwriting that addressed it caused the cheek of my Lady to whiten suddenly, and her dark eyes to glow with strange agitation as she tore the sealed paper in tremulous haste. Her lassitude, her fashionable weariness, her graceful laisser aller were gone in a moment, and she sat up among her lace-fringed pillows as wakeful and alert a creature as a dairymaid at cock-crow. The packet contained two letters, one, a fine feminine specimen of caligraphy, with a tendency to unmistakable Germanism in many of the capitals; the other written throughout with the bold free hand of a man, in the Italian language and signed, Baldassarre. With a nervous eagerness of touch the countess opened the Italian letter first, but she had not turned the first of its pages before the tears began to gather heavily under her long drooping lashes. For the most part the letter was an account of a death-bed which the writer had attended, and the words in which the scene was described were singularly touching and poetical, for he who had written them was an artist, and he spoke out of the deep of a grand and tender soul, the soul of the master poet-painters of old divine Italia.

 

            “As for Tristan,” said the letter, ending the pathetic record, “I had hoped that he would have lived here with me, and continued his studies in my house, but Frau Engel as soon as she perceived herself to be dying, charged him earnestly to seek your ladyship, either in London or in Paris, and Tristan himself so intensely longs to see you that I have no heart either to desire anything contrary to the wish of the good Frau, or

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to restrain the natural impulse of my dear boy. But when, where, and under what circumstances you are to meet him, all this, of course, madame, must be decided only by you. Tristan, always impatient to see your face, would fain go to London at once, but unless you are prepared to end so soon a secrecy, which, I cannot persuade myself need ever have begun, I think it best your rendezvous should suffer a longer delay, until you are able to meet in Paris.

 

            “The years of my life double those of your ladyship’s, and I scarcely, believe, therefore, that you will think ill of me for ending here with a protest and an anxious prayer. It is true, madame, that I do not understand the penalties of your great position among the noblesse of England, nor am I able to enter into the spirit of your national customs and prejudices, so that if I seem to you to offer ignorant advice or to speak foolishly upon a subject I cannot comprehend, you will the more easily know how to forgive my faults. But is it necessary for the support of any dignity that a pure love and a natural duty should be sacrificed, that a mask should be held before the face of a woman for a life-time, and a trespass against an artificial régime concealed from the knowledge of the world with as much scrupulous solicitude as though it were a crime that had broken the laws of God? Believe me, madame, no good can ever come of a secret. All mystery is wrong and unnatural, all reserve, except with villains, is gross error. Secret societies are bad, secret tribunals are bad, secret assassinations are worse than open murders; but secrets in families are more deplorable in their results than any other social wrongs possible. They break confidences that ought to be sacred, they taint loves that ought to be untarnished, they destroy peace that ought to be absolute. To keep a secret from our dear ones is to lie with a thorn in our pillow, for where we should be most at rest, there instead we are constantly uneasy. Take courage, madame, I beseech you, even if the confession of your past must involve your disgrace in the future. I know nothing of the society in which you live, nor of your English law, and but very little of your national opinions and religion; but, surely, surely, if all were known, no disgrace, no shadow

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of blame could rest upon you in the thoughts of those to whom you are dear. And what, compared with them, is that world whose favour you value so highly, whose censure you so terribly dread? It appears to me, indeed, that, after all, we need not look far for a solution to the problems of the day concerning natural theology, its true meaning and its most frequent form, for men must certainly be their own Gods, since they fear one another’s opinion, and worship one another with far more unwearying devotion and awe than they pay to any other order of being.

 

            “I have no more to say. The letter I have the honour to enclose for your ladyship, was given to me by the dear Frau three days before her death. She wrote it, she said, some months ago, but for several reasons hesitated then to send it to you. But now she desired me to let you have it. I do not know its purport. Tristan will remain with me, sharing my studio, until we receive an intimation of your wishes with regard to his future movements, and I cannot help adding that he has so free a hand and so large a love for his father’s art, that if only Heaven gives him years wherein to work, I believe he will win for himself that golden success and happy fame, which Death, always envious of the highly-gifted, denied to the genius of Jean le Rodeur.

 

            “I kiss your ladyship’s hands.”

 

            And the letter that was enclosed ran thus:

 

            “MY DARLING CHILD LORA, –

 

            “I am such an old woman now, and the life I have lived lies so far in the haze of the distance behind me, that I believe the end of my journeys must be very near, and I do not wish to die until I have told you my history – that history, dear Lora, that you so often begged me to tell you when you were a little tender-hearted child, sitting at my feet – that history about which you used to speculate so fantastically when you grew to be an imaginative sympathetic girl.

 

            “I have always been known to you, dearest, as Frau Engel, and I believe you used to fancy for me in the dim past some Alcyone-and-Ceyx-like romance, with married bliss as perfect and briefly sweet as the happiness which that classic pair enjoyed, and a catastrophe as sudden and as

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tragic as that which broke the heart of the faithful Alcyone. But I never related the story you longed so much to hear, because in the first place, I did not wish to revive a dead bitterness in my own soul; and, secondly, because when you were a child you could not have understood such a story as mine; and when you were grown a woman I was ashamed and afraid to tell it you. But now that I am sure I have not much longer to live, I feel it hard to keep silence, for if I do, I shall leave the work of my life unaccomplished and my duty unperformed. And since, in order to complete that word of mine and to perform that duty, it is necessary that at least one person remaining upon earth should know my past; I have chosen to tell it to you, as well for reasons which I will tell you by-and-by, as because you are my dearest and best beloved, and I have no friends nor relatives left to me elsewhere, or if I have I do not know where they are – I dropped out of their world so long ago.

 

            “For I was never a wife, Lora, although I was once a mother. That was wicked of me, and my aunt and uncle with whom I lived then, – being an orphan – thought it so dreadful that they turned me out of their house with my baby-girl, and I had to live alone. My child’s father could not marry me, as I had believed he intended to do. He told me that if I had not understood he had already a wife in Spain, that was no fault of his for he had taken it for granted that I knew it from the beginning of our passion, and if not – why then I ought to have counted the probable cost of my sweetmeat before I tasted it. That made me nearly mad. I flung the money he gave me after him, as he turned away from my door; and when ho was gone and the night was dark, and the stars out over all the peaceful Heaven, I ran with my baby to the convent of Notre Dame de bon Secours, close by the house in which I lived. I shall never forget, Lora, how calm and infinitely restful the convent chapel and the long quiet corridors seemed to me as I passed along them with the sweet-faced sister who conducted me to the room of the Mère Supérieure. All the windings and corners of the building were fragrant with incense, for the nuns were swinging censers and chanting the hours in the aisles of the sanctuary, and the deep solemn swell of the organ and the sound of the

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singing voices, subdued and toned with distance, impressed upon me a strange new sense of serenity and religious peace. I fell at the knees of the reverend mother, and told her all my story. How sweet women are when they are kind; I felt sure when I saw this woman, and heard her gentle words, that God could not be hard to deal with, since one who devoted herself to His service, and was only a servant of His, was so plentiful in compassion and tenderness. She took my baby, and the sisters had the charge of it from that day; but I went back into the world to earn my living and the child’s.

 

            “It was then, my dearest, in a happy hour, that your father met me at Carlsruhe, and you became to me my Juliet, and I your nurse. You were not six years old when the dear God put you thus under my care, and seeing you such a desolate and lonely child, my heart was drawn towards you, and you loved me so much in return, that when the Baron spoke of revisiting Scotland, I could not resolve to let you go without me, and your childish tears and entreaties moved me beyond the power of resistance.

 

            “So I caught you to my bosom, and promised I would not leave you – how could I have forsaken such a forlorn, motherless little being – and we went to Arisaig Towers together. And I stayed with you, coming and going year by year about Italy and the Rhineland, for more than fifteen years.

 

            “It was on the feast of S. Dorothea that l gave my child to the Mère Supérieure, and the nuns baptised her by the name of that holy martyr, and I thought that when she grew older, she also would have become a sacred virgin, as her heavenly patroness has been. But while she was still a child, not yet sixteen, the sisters noticed her singing in chapel, and they thought her voice so singularly beautiful that they resolved to have her taught by the best masters, that she might be better able to employ her wonderful talent in the services of the Church. And the master who came to the convent-school to teach her was an Englishman, named Lawrence Starr who had recently come to Germany to be conductor of an operatic company in Wiesbaden during the season. He fell in love with my child, and

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told the Mother that if she liked to consent to the marriage he proposed, he would make a great artiste of Dorothea, and a grand name for her in the future; that it was not fit such a voice as hers should be hushed between nunnery walls, and that her vocation evidently lay elsewhere. The good Mother was very sorry. She pleaded that no gift of God’s could be better used than in His service, and that fame was a very flimsy matter after all, and not at all worth the price that had to be paid for it; but Dorothea was dazzled by her lover’s fine predictions, and she begged so hard and so tearfully for her freedom, that the sisters wrote to me for my consent; and I gave it – God forgive me! I could not forsee the future of my darling! You and I were at Rome for that last time, when this wedding took place at Wiesbaden. And I think that Dorothea’s prayers and the kindness the Mère Supérieure showed to the lovers, had some share in softening my heart toward you who were just then in the like plight. I did not care to be less kind in such a matter than the reverend mother, and you pleaded as fervently for your ‘happiness’ as Dorothea did for hers. Poor children, both of you! Poor unfortunate, foolishly-indulged children! Well, Lora, you were married, and so was she, and the joy that followed was brief enough. Dorothea’s husband gave up his engagement in Wiesbaden and took her to England and brought her out in some London concerts. Eighteen months after, you and I parted forever, you were left alone at Arisaig Towers, and I was back in Germany with little Tristan. All this time, from the first week of her wedded life until I quitted Arisaig, my Dorothea wrote to me often, and once or twice her husband wrote also. Then I heard that a daughter was born to them, and then the letters became fewer and shorter, until at last there was silence altogether. I wrote again and again, but there was no reply, and one day a packet reached me, containing most of my letters with their seals broken, returned by the officials of the English post-office and marked  'unknown.'  Then all my great love for my darling burst out into a flame, and I resolved to go to England to look for her; if she yet lived to hold her once more to my heart; if she were dead, to find the place where they had made her grave.

 

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            "I sold everything I had, my home, my goods, and all my living, and went to England with only little Tristan for a companion, to seek my daughter. First I visited the house where she had lived and found it to be a small villa in one of the fashionable parts of Kensington, but there were strange people there who knew nothing of their predecessors, beyond the fact that they were not commonly reported to have been very happy together. I made numberless inquiries, wandered up and down among the suburbs, and addressed myself to all the concert-hall agents and musical managers round the metropolis; but to no purpose. All I could learn about Dorothea was little enough; her name was known certainly to one or two directors and lessees, but for some unexplained reason she had ceased to be connected with any company of public performers, and her husband had long ago retired from the profession. For five years, dear Lora, I wandered about the country with little Tristan, seeking the child I had lost, until at length all my money was spent in the vain pursuit, and l went back to Germany, broken-hearted and penniless. It was during those terrible years of disappointment that I acquired the white hair you wondered at so much when you saw me at Mayence in ‘61. I was not forty-five when I returned from my wanderings, but I was old – old with shame, and disgrace, and loneliness; old with anxiety, and with the bitter experience of the yearning of a love that was defeated, and of intense desire and hope deferred. It is the worst form of old age that humanity can endure. I went to work again when I got back to my old home at Wiesbaden, and worked on with Tristan for two more years. One day a letter came for me from England. It was from my lost darling. Ah. Lora! such a sad story that I should have wept with pity and burned with indignation over it, had it only been the story of a stranger; but it was hers; and I stamped my foot and shrieked aloud in my furious anger. My darling had never been happy, she said, since she left the convent, but she would not tell me that in her letters for fear of making me sorrowful. Her husband was a wicked man; and he gamed and drank, and lived dissolutely, while he made her sing for the support of his vices. She had one little child, a girl, and from the time of its

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birth, she became an invalid and her beauty faded, But Lawrence made her sing the more, and he drank the harder; and the child he hated, and grew to hate the mother too, until at last one day he left the house and went to live with another woman, as bad as himself. Then my darling thought she was free, and she toiled early and late. And gave lessons, and put some money in a savings-bank, and did well for a time. But one day, almost two months after he had left her, Lawrence Starr met her at the door of her house as she came home from receiving part of her salary, and he forced open her hand and took the money from her. After that he called in a broker and sold everything she had bought during his absence, except a few things in one small room where he chose to sleep. Then she went to the bank to fetch a little of the money she had placed there for herself and her child, but the clerk told her her husband had been already, and had drawn out every penny. In her despair my darling applied to the magistrate of the place, but he could give her nothing but sympathy. Her husband was a scoundrel no doubt, said the justice, but his actions were warranted by English law. All she had belonged to him, she had no legal right to her own earnings, even if her husband chose to spend them upon his own debaucheries. He had not deserted her in the eye of the law, for he was now under her roof, and consequently, no order of protection could be granted her. If he starved or assaulted her, that was another thing, but she had not complained of actual cruelty, and the law took no cognizance of marital robbery (‘appropriation’ the magistrate called it). The husband was supreme owner, and the wife’s duty was submission to her lord. She could claim nothing of her own, nothing could belong to her, she and hers were absolutely his. My darling cried out ‘was this English justice? – was this the chivalry of British legislation?’ The magistrate shrugged his shoulders. Husband and wife were one, he said, in the eye of the law; they were not treated as separate persons, for the husband represented his wife as well as himself. ‘Say rather,’ she answered, ‘that in the eye of your law the wife is un-represented. Your law deals with a fiction of its own creation, for no two

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persons can ever be actually one. You do not legislate for heavenly unions, but for earthly alliances, and the law should be fitted to the existing state of things, for that state cannot be moulded to suit the law.’

 

            “The magistrate smiled. He said there would be a pretty subversion of masculine authority and terrible disorder in homes if wives were to be recognized as femmes soles, and permitted to own their personal belongings themselves. Most women did not repine at their condition, but her case was an unhappy exception. ‘Do you think it is, sir?’ she asked him. At that the magistrate looked uneasy, and muttered something about unfortunate depravity, and wishing it were otherwise, and said he must go to his lunch. My darling went home then, but her heart was broken, and she wept night and day. Some friend she had made at one of the theatres died, and left her a legacy of £500. But the law gave her no right to it. It was paid to Lawrence Starr, and he squandered it in six months among his low paramours and bottle companions. But by the end of that six months he had drunk himself into a fever upon that money, which, if there be such a thing as moral right, was rightfully his wife’s; and he died raving, a criminal as systematic, and as barbarous is ever went to God’s judgment. This happened a year ago, she said, after a married life of nine miserable years. She had lived alone for the last twelve months, but now, she knew that she could live no longer, and she was coming back to Germany, out of the hateful country where she had suffered so much, that she might die in her old home and be buried in the cemetery, where the sisters were wont to pass to and fro by the long green mounds.

 

            “She wanted me to go to Antwerp to meet her and little Gretel, and she added the date of her intended arrival at that place. Tristan was nearly nine years old then, and the good Baldassarre had come to Wiesbaden in order to take us both to Rome.

 

            “So I left my dear boy in the care of the Maestro, and went full of joy to Antwerp; but when the boat came in on the appointed day, Dorothea was not among the passengers. I waited a fortnight at Antwerp, thinking

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that each day might bring my dear child, but I waited in vain. l could not write to her, for she had not been able to give me any address in London, and I could get no news of her from the captains whom I questioned. There was only one chance remaining to me, and that lay in a second journey to England. So I wrote to Baldassarre, begging him to have a care of Tristan until my return to Wiesbaden, and then I set out once more on my pilgrimage. After many weeks of laborious search and tedious enquiry, I found that my darling had arrived at a second-rate hotel by London-bridge, on the evening before the date she had named in her letter for our meeting. She was very ill when she entered the house – so the landlord related – and fatigue and debility barely permitted her sufficient strength to walk. Little Gretel was with her, and they occupied a room together, overlooking the place of embarkation. In the night my darling died. Much trouble, the landlord said, was taken to discover whether there were any relatives or friends who could be summoned to remove the body, but to no avail, and the child protested that she and her mother were absolutely alone in the world save for the German grandmother whom they had been on their way to visit, when death arrested their progress. But the child did not know the name of this grandmother nor her place of abode, or if she had heard either mentioned, had, with a child’s shortness of memory, forgotten it. So the parish authorities were called in, and my darling was laid in the grave of a beggar. As for little Gretel, the landlord had arranged to send her to the workhouse, but when the child was told of his charitable intention, she ‘trudged,’ no one knew whither, and I daresay no one cared very much to inquire. She was a waif and a stray. ‘Had Mrs. Starr no money with her?’ I asked. Not more, the landlord answered, than sufficed to recompense him for the trouble, loss, and expense, to which he was put by – the inconvenience of a death in his establishment! Dear God! how hard these trading creatures are! What dry gourds the world’s worm makes of human hearts! I thought of the sweet-faced Mère Supérieure and her gentle nuns of Notre Dame de Bon Secours, and sighed to think what a pitiful exchange my darling had made.

 

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            “But I never found little Gretel. Sorrowfully I went back to Wiesbaden, and there I found Baldassarre waiting for my return. We journeyed on to Rome, he and Tristan and I, and from that day to this I have never rested in my search after my grand-daughter! Every Spring, for thirteen years, I visited my old home and made enquiries among the neighbours about her, for I thought ‘maybe the child has found her way to Wiesbaden, or yet may find it.’ But she did not come. I put notices in the newspapers, home and foreign, and I wrote to the matron of that work-house in London, to which the poor child was to have been sent, that if ever tidings were heard of her, they should be repeated to me; but nothing that I did availed to elicit the least response. Now I am dying at the age of sixty, and all my life has been a life of wandering and futile toil; but I write this to you, Lora mine, at the last, not only for the reasons I gave you in the beginning of my letter, but because chiefly it is borne upon my soul with the light of the sunset in which I stand to-day, that to you God will commit the success He has seen it good for me to miss. I believe, dearest, that in heaven it is appointed to you to find the child of my darling. It is meet that it should be so, for so will my penance be the better accomplished, and the bond between your soul and mine be made the more perfect in strength and fitness. We Germans are a nation of idealists and metaphysicians; we see visions and dream dreams all our lives, but the spiritual faculty is strongest within us as we near the Eternal Hills and see them revealed in the transcendent glow of the sundown. Some among us are prophets then. But if, indeed, through the charity of the good God, it should ever be given you to find Gretel Starr, remember that I loved and nourished Tristan, and let the child of my darling be dear to your heart for the sake of her grandmother, and of the years that are gone by.”

 

            There the long letter ended. And my Lady, in the solitude of her chamber, bowed her queenly head upon the close-written pages, and wept such heavy, dangerous tears as the darkling clouds of heaven weep in summer. They were, in truth, the first drops of a thunder-storm.

 

Índice Geral das Seções   Índice da Seção Atual   Indice da Obra Atual   Anterior: IV - Twenty Years After    Seguinte: VI - “Fate is nigh the lordly line of high St. Clair”