"Certainly not," replied Ghisleri, with the utmost calmness. "I suppose your instinct told you that it would be more novel and effective if the Saint yielded than if she played the old-fashioned scene of crushing the devil under her foot."
"Would you have let yourself be crushed?"
"By you--yes." Ghisleri spoke slowly and looked steadily into her eyes.
The Contessa"s face softened a little, and she paused before she answered him.
"I wish I knew--I wish I were sure whether I really have any influence over you," she said softly, and then sighed and looked away.
It was very late when the party broke up, though all had professed the most positive intention of going home when the clock struck twelve. The Princess of Gerano offered Arden a seat in her carriage, and Pietro Ghisleri went away alone. As he pa.s.sed through the deserted dining-room, and through the hall where he had sat so long with the Contessa, he could not help glancing at the corner where they had talked, and he thought involuntarily of the prologue to the tableau. His face was set rather sternly, but he smiled, too, as he went by.
"It is not my last Carnival yet," he said to himself, as he drew on a great driving-coat which covered his costume completely. Then he went out.
It is very hard to say whether he was a sentimental man or not. Men who write second-rate verses when they are alone, generally are; but, on the other hand, those who knew him would not have allowed that he possessed a grain of what is commonly called sentimentality. The word probably means a sort of vague desire to experience rather fict.i.tious emotions, with the intention of believing oneself to be pa.s.sionate by nature, and in that sense the weakness could not justly be attributed to Ghisleri.
But on this particular night he did a thing which many people would undoubtedly have called sentimental. He turned aside from the highway when he left the great palace in which Gouache lived, and he allowed himself to wander aimlessly on through the older part of the city, until he stopped opposite to the door of a church which stood in a broad street near the end of the last by-way he had traversed. The night was dark and gloomy and the stillness was only broken now and then by a distant s.n.a.t.c.h of song, a burst of laughter, or the careless tw.a.n.g of a guitar, just as Ghisleri had described it. Indeed it was by no means the first time that he had walked home in the small hours of Ash Wednesday morning, after a night of gaiety and emotion.
It chanced that the church upon which he had accidentally come was the one known as the Church of Prayer and Death. It stands in the Via Giulia, behind the Palazzo Farnese. He realised the fact at once, and it seemed like a bad omen. He stood still a long time, looking at the gloomy door with steady eyes.
"Just such a place as this," he said, in a low tone. "Just such a church as that, just such a man as I am. Is this the comedy and was this evening the reality? Or is it the other way?"
He called up before his eyes the scene in which he had acted, and his imagination obeyed him readily enough. He could fancy how the monk and the nun would look, and the train of revellers, and their movements and gestures. But the nun"s face was not that of the Contessa. Another shone out vividly in its place.
"Just G.o.d!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the lonely man. "Am I so bad as that? Not to care after so much?"
He turned upon his heel as though to escape the vision, and walked quickly away, hating himself. But he was mistaken. He cared--as he expressed it--far more than he dreamed of, more deeply, perhaps, in his own self-contradictory, irregular fashion than the woman of whom he was thinking.
People talked for some time of the Shrove Tuesday feast at Gouache"s studio. Then they fell to talking about other things. Lent pa.s.sed in the usual way, and there was not much change in the lives of the persons most concerned in this history. Ghisleri saw much less of Arden than formerly, of course, as the latter was wholly absorbed by his pa.s.sion for his future wife. As for the world, it was as much occupied with dinner parties, musical evenings, and private theatricals as it had formerly been with dancing. The time sped quickly. The past season had left behind it an enormous Corpus Scandalorum Romanorum which made conversation both easy and delightful. How many of the unpleasant stories concerning Lord Herbert Arden, Laura Carlyon, Pietro Ghisleri, and Maddalena dell" Armi could have been distinctly traced to Adele Savelli, it is not easy to say. As a matter of fact, very few persons excepting Ghisleri himself took any trouble to trace them at all. To the average worldly taste it is as unpleasant to follow up the origin of a delightfully savoury lie, as it is to think, while eating, of the true history of a beefsteak, from the meadow to the table by way of the slaughter-house and the cook"s fingers.
Holy week came, and the m.u.f.fled bells and the silence in houses at other times full and noisy, and the general air of depression which results, most probably, from a certain amount of genuine repentance and devotion which is felt in a place where by no means all are bad at heart, and many are sincerely good. The gay set felt uncomfortable, and a certain number experienced for the first time the most distinct aversion to confessing their misdeeds, as they ought to do at least once a year. As far as they were concerned, Ghisleri"s verses expressed more truth than they had expected to find in them. Ghisleri himself was rarely troubled by any return of the qualm which had seized him before the door of the Church of Prayer and Death, and never again in the same degree. If he did not go on his way rejoicing, he at all events proceeded without remorse, and was wicked enough and selfish enough to congratulate himself upon the fact.
Arden and Laura were perfectly happy. They, at least, had little cause to reproach themselves with any evil done in the world since they had met, and Arden had a.s.suredly better reason for congratulating himself.
It would indeed have been hard to find a happier man than he, and his happiness was perfectly legitimate and well founded. Whether it would prove durable was another matter, not so easy of decision. But the facts of the present were strong enough to crush all apprehension for the future. It was not strange that it should be so.
He could not be said to have led a lonely life. His family were deeply attached to him, and from earliest boyhood everything had been done to alleviate the moral suffering inevitable in his case, and to make his material existence as bearable as possible, in spite of his terrible infirmities. But for the unvarying sympathy of many loving hearts, and the unrelaxing care of those who were sincerely devoted to him, Arden could hardly have hoped to attain to manhood at all, much less to the healthy moral growth which made him very unlike most men in his condition, or the comparative health of body whereby he was able to enjoy without danger much of what came in his way. He was in reality a much more social and sociable man than his friend Ghisleri, though he did not possess the same elements of success in society. He was, indeed, sensitive, as has been said, in spite of his denial of the fact, but he was not bitter about his great misfortune. Hitherto only one very painful thought had been connected with his deformity, beyond the constant sense of physical inferiority to other men. He had felt, and not without reason, that he must renounce the love of woman and the hope of wedded happiness, as being utterly beyond the bounds of all human possibility. And now, as though Heaven meant to compensate him to the full for the suffering inflicted and patiently borne, he had won, almost without an effort, the devoted love of the first woman for whom he had seriously cared. It was almost too good.
Love had taken him, and had clothed him in a new humanity, as it seemed to him, straightening the feeble limbs, strengthening the poor ill-matched shoulders, broadening and deepening the sunken chest that never held breath enough before wherewith to speak out full words of pa.s.sionate happiness. Love had dawned upon the dusk of his dark morning as the dawn of day upon a leaden sea, scattering unearthly blossoms in the path of the royal sun, breathing the sweet breeze of living joy upon the flat waters of unprofitable discontent.
To those who watch the changing world with its manifold scenes and its innumerable actors, whose merest farce is ever and only the prologue to the tragedy which awaits all, there is nothing more wonderful, nothing more beautiful, nothing more touching--perhaps few things more sacred--than the awakening of a n.o.ble heart at love"s first magic touch.
The greater miracle of spring is done before our eyes each year, the sun shines and the gra.s.s grows, it rains and all things are refreshed, and the dead seed"s heart breaks with the joy of coming life, bursts and shoots up to meet the warmth of the sunshine and be kissed by the west wind. But we do not see, or seeing, care for none of these things in the same measure in which we care for ourselves--and perhaps for others. We turn from the budding flower wearily enough at last, and we own that though it speak to us and touch us, its language is all but strange and its meaning wholly a mystery. Nature tells us little except by a.s.sociation with hearts that have beaten for ours, and then sometimes she tells us all. But the heart itself is the thing, the reality, the seat of all our thoughts and the stay of all our being. Selfishly we see what it does in ourselves, and in others we may see it and watch it without thought of self. It is asleep to-day, lethargic, heavy, dull, scarce moving in the breast that holds it. To-morrow it is awake, leaping, breaking, splendidly alive, the very source of action, the leader in life"s fight, the conqueror of the whole opposing world, bursting to-day the chains of which only yesterday it could not lift a link, overthrowing now, with a touch, the barriers which once seemed so impenetrable and so strong, scorning the deathlike inaction of the past, tossing the mountains of impossibility before it as a child tosses pebbles by the sea. The miracle is done, and love has done it, as only love really can.
But it must be the right sort of love and the heart it touches must be neither common nor unclean in the broad, true sense--such a heart, say, as Herbert Arden"s, and such love as he felt for Laura, then and afterwards.
"My life began on the evening when I first met you, dear," he said, as they sat by the open window on Easter Day, looking down at the flowers on the terrace behind the Palazzo Braccio.
"You cannot make me believe that you loved me at first sight!" Laura laughed happily.
"Why not?" he asked gravely. "No woman ever spoke to me as you did then, and I felt it. Is it strange? But it hurt me, too, at first, and I used to suffer during that first month."
"Let that be the first and the last pain you ever have by me," answered the young girl. "I know you suffered, though I cannot even now tell why.
Can you?"
"Easily enough," said Arden, resting his chin upon his folded hands as they lay upon the white marble sill of the window, scarcely less white than they. The att.i.tude was habitual to him when he was in that place.
He could not rest his elbow on the slab as Laura could, for he was too short as he sat in his chair.
"Easily?" she asked. "Then tell me."
"Very easily. You can understand it too. When I knew that I loved you, I knew--I believed, at least, that another suffering had been found for me, as though I had not enough already. Of course, I was hopeless. How could I tell, how could any one guess that you--you of all women--with your beauty, your youth, your splendid woman"s heart--could ever care for me? Oh, my darling--dear, dearest--is there no other word? If I could only tell you half!"
"If you could tell me all, you would only have told half, love," said Laura. "There is mine to tell, too--and it is not a little." She bent down to him and softly kissed the beautiful pale forehead.
The bright flush came to Arden"s cheek and died away again in the happy silence that followed. But he raised his head, and his two hands took one of hers and gently covered it.
"You must always be the same to me," he said, almost under his breath.
"You have given me this new life--do not take it from me again--the old would be impossible now, not to be lived."
"It need never be lived, it never shall be, if I live myself," answered Laura. "If only I could make you sure of that, I should be really happy.
But you do not really doubt it, Herbert, do you?"
"No, dear, to doubt you would be to doubt everything--though it is hard to believe that it can all be so good, and last."
"It does not seem hard to me. Perhaps a woman believes everything more easily than a man does. She needs to believe more, I suppose, and so she finds it easy."
"No woman ever needed to believe as much as I," answered Arden, thoughtfully. He still held her hand, and pa.s.sed one of his own lightly over it, just pressing it now and then, as though to make sure that it was real. "Except yourself, dear one," he added a moment later, with a sharp, short breath, as though something hurt him.
Laura was quick to understand him, and to feel all that he felt. She heard the little sigh and looked into his face and saw the expression of something like pain there. She laid her free hand upon his shoulder and gazed into his soft brown eyes.
"Herbert dear," she said, "I know what you are thinking about. I was put into the world to make you forget those things, and, G.o.d willing, I will. You shall forget them as completely as I do, or if you remember them they shall be dear to you, in a way, as they are to me."
A wonderful look of loving grat.i.tude was in his face, and he pressed her fingers closely in his.
"Tell me one thing, Laura--only this once and I will not speak of it again. When you touch me--when you lay your hand on my shoulder--when you kiss my forehead--tell me quite truly, dear, do you not feel anything like--like a sort of horror, a kind of repulsion, as if you were touching something--well--unpleasant to touch?"
Poor Arden really did not know how much he was loved. Laura"s deep eyes opened wide for an instant, as he spoke, then almost closed again, and her lips quivered. Then suddenly without warning the bright tears welled up and overflowed. She hid her face in her hands and sobbed bitterly.
"Oh, Herbert," she cried, "that you should think it of me, when I love you as though my heart would break!"
With a movement that would have cost him a painful effort at any other time, Arden rose and clasped her to him and tried to soothe her, caressing her thick black hair, and kissing her forehead tenderly, with a sort of pa.s.sionate reverence that was his own, and speaking such words as came to his lips in the deep emotion of the moment.
"Forgive me, darling, how could I hurt you? Laura--sweetheart Laura--beloved--do not cry--I know it now--I shall never think of it again. No, dear, no--there, say you have forgiven me!"
"Forgiven you, dear--what is there to forgive?" She looked up with streaming eyes.
"Everything, love--those tears of yours, first of all--"
She dried her eyes and made him sit down again before she spoke, looking out of the window at the flowers.
"It is not your fault," she said at last. "I have not shown you how I love yet--that is all. But I will, soon."