Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

Bianca that night was roused from the deadness of sleep by unaccustomed signs of life in her bedfellow, Camilla, who, she realized with horror, was struggling in the effort to keep her sobbing inside and unheard.

“What is it? Oh, what is the matter?” she asked, feeling in the dark for her sister’s shoulder.

“_Non mi seccare!_” Camilla answered, with a furious dash of her heel. “Bother me not!” but without concealment after that she relieved her need to weep.

Giulio at Vicchio, far among the hills! Giulio thinking of her, while from the high loggia he looked Florenceward. Giulio sending his wishes as he gazed at Venus--_stella confidente!_--brightening in the fading sunset!

The pain of absence, of this black and total silence, was such that on the fourth day, after reading over all his letters, she broke the rule and stole out to go for just a minute to his street and satisfy her yearning to see the windows of his vacant room.

She did not go far, for on the way she saw him, or--for a moment she thought herself the victim, possibly, of an hallucination. It was his exact image, anyhow. He walked along lightly, his straw hat far back on his head, his pretty nose and white teeth to the wind, talking with a boy of his own age and type. He was laughing, as he drew something on the air with his half-burned cigarette; she caught the glint in the sunshine of the signet-ring on his little finger. She turned and ran.

That day she asked Bianca whether she would help her, and then she told her everything.

At evening--Antenore was kept late at the station on certain nights of the week--they slipped out together while Aunt Battistina’s back was turned, and hurrying like guilty creatures went to the Cornelio gardens.

Almost invariably, when Camilla had asked how he had spent the evening, Giulio had said, “At Cornelio’s, with my father.”

They posted themselves in an unlighted doorway whence they could watch the entrance of the fashionable open-air café. Over the laurel wall inside the iron railing floated golden haze. Between pieces of band-music were intervals of clattering china and voices. Figures passed in and out.

It was not so simple as they had thought, this waiting. Wishing to be as unnoticed as mice, they felt more conspicuous than camels. Bianca’s little yellow dog, Pallina, who had refused absolutely to stay behind, had the vile habit of yapping at passers; cracks and cuffs would not subdue her. The persons barked at naturally turned to look.

Half a dozen times footsteps were heard, or imagined, on the stairs farther within. The girls each time hurried out of the way, and, against their habit, afraid of everybody, walked along the house fronts the length of the gardens, then back, to ensconce themselves again, very uneasy as to what the guard of public safety had thought, half expecting him to darken the doorway suddenly and question them. Oh, it was an evening to remember like some painful nightmare! Camilla, in spite of all, never lost sight of their reason for being there.

Now she seized Bianca’s arm. Giulio was coming out, with a party--the boy of earlier in the day, and two young girls dressed exactly alike, the cousins, very likely; behind them came a middle-aged gentleman and lady.

“The grandmother must be getting well,” said Camilla through her teeth, “seeing that they can laugh like that!”

“We will say,” she arranged with Bianca on the way home, “that while we stood at the door taking the air, Maria Nutini and her mother passed, and we joined them for a turn. They left us at the corner.”

Every time Bianca was wakened that night, she saw Camilla writing. Once tears were falling upon the paper. Ordered to keep still, Bianca sorrowfully relapsed into her healthy young sleep.

In the morning Camilla posted her letter. If it fell into his mother’s hands, so much the worse for him.

To live on, days, months, years, with that burden of love turned back upon the heart, like a dammed-in torrent, how could it be endured? What, what did one do to destroy the spell by which another got this dreadful power to fill one’s every thought, made himself master over the motions of one’s blood? For Camilla, in her outraged pride, desired not to love Giulio any more.

The hours of suspense were so intolerable that more than once she wished she never had been born. She had calculated the earliest at which she might expect an answer. She allowed not an hour more before writing him again. And then she waited with confidence, knowing positively that she should see him.

In this second waiting she had the first glimmering notion that she might feel better by and by, that the burning sense of ignominy attached to feeling oneself trampled and disdained might be turned to victorious gladness by making the other, the dear enemy, feel himself more trampled, more disdained.

She was not wishing that she never had been born, while, gathering suggestion from Spanish ballad and Sicilian tale, she plotted a development of the story in every point worthy of herself. Her scene firmly imagined and finished off with the right artistic touches, she could actually hum that afternoon. When Bianca, helping Battistina to hunt for the vegetable-knife needed to prepare supper, asked her whether she had seen anything of it, she could answer by a careless snatch of song.

At ten precisely, without the necessity to ring, the little door cut in the large one yielded to Giulio’s hand. He was fortified to meet his lady just inside, but the great hallway was empty. Surprised, he took a few doubtful steps, made up his mind, and fell to pacing the floor. After a while, he stopped under the middle arch, sent an absent glance from window to window up the white shaft to the square of blue, and composed himself to wait where he stood, arms crossed, feet well apart. He was a trifle pale, and with his troubled air appeared more grown-up than when, six or seven weeks ago, with the desert ahead of the long empty season in town, he had wondered what resources of distraction the streets, his only hope, might afford.

Half an hour passed. The shutter inside the window above and opposite moved; Camilla’s hand appeared, beckoning him to mount the stairs.

She met him at the door of the _primo piano_, but when he would have taken her hand she hurried before him, into Mademoiselle Heller’s own sacred sitting-room, where the chairs were in ghostly covers and the chandelier was muffled in a gauze bag. The closed windows kept out the heat and noise, kept in the faint musty smell. She turned, they looked at each other, and she smiled, as it struck him, a singular smile.

“You wished to see me,” he said.

“I did. But I have seen you already. For twenty minutes I watched you from behind the shutter when you did not know I was there; you were standing under the arch. And--I believe it saved your life. See what I had brought.” She showed him a little knife, bright and pointed, with a handle of horn. (It must be said that her dagger looked rather like a vegetable-knife.) He gave a just perceptible start. His heart had naturally jumped. But he knew, deep down, that the dagger was part of play-acting. With a gesture intended insolently to reassure, she threw it on the table, and smiled the singular smile which twisted her lips to an expression of such excessive irony. “Be not afraid. I had never seen your face when you were trying to cover your fear and inventing lies to tell me. After that spectacle, I decided you were not worthy of my powder. No, you need fear nothing from that silly stiletto, either for yourself or for me. I am not sure which I meant it for. Both, perhaps.”

“Come, Camilla,” he began, in the low, soft, ultra-reasonable tone which any man knows is the one to adopt with excited, unreasonable women. “Come! This is hardly the speech to hold to me. You are too agitated to know what you are saying. It seems to me that after such a letter as you wrote, threatening me--_nientedimeno!_--with a blow on the cheek wherever you met me, before everybody, it is I rather than you who have the right to call myself offended. If I am here, it is because I love you in spite of your bad treatment of me, and I wish to explain.”

This gentle and well-intentioned speech was interrupted by a sort of human feminine rendering of a leonine roar from Camilla. “Zurigo! Zurigo! Ha!” she exclaimed, “those are your tactics, are they? What you are thinking is that in a few days more you will depart for Zurigo. You need only keep up this comedy for a few days and then you can drop me without fear. All you will have to do is not to write.” Her eyes flared up intense and green; she took a pantherine step nearer. “But I--” she smacked the varnished table startlingly with the flat of her palm--“I do not admit that I am a person who can be dropped. And you are here in order that I may drop you first, and in such a manner as you cannot mistake or forget. You shall know yourself quite certainly, my fine sir, to have been discarded. But I wish you to remember for another time.” Another pantherine step nearer. His manhood, of which he was at the moment intensely conscious, forbade his receding by an inch. “I wish you to remember, for another time, that one does not so lightly take up and throw over persons like me. A man of nothing, like yourself, takes a puny wax doll to make love to and then neglect, knowing that it is safe.” She was under his very nose. “I wish you to learn the danger there is in making love to--to tigresses! Will you remember hereafter--” his head was suddenly clutched, he felt claws through his hair--“to keep to your own kind and let alone such creatures as could eat you at a bite? A man should be the stronger, while you--I could dare, fight, love, ten to your one. I saw it while you stood down there. Will you remember?”

The pain of her iron finger-nails in his scalp was fairly unendurable, but he stood it with boyish dignity, like a little Spartan; for one thing, certain that if he tried to free himself he would come forth all the more sorrily scratched; for another, not finding this maltreatment by passionate feminine fingers altogether disagreeable. His eyes were half closed, an enigmatic smile played over his lips. At the same time, he was intensely on the alert, ready to prevent her making him ridiculous beyond a certain limit.

“Will you remember,” she said, “what happens when one amuses oneself with persons who have blood in their veins? Will you? There, go! I do not believe you will forget.”

She released him with a push. With ceremonious deliberation he took out his pocket-handkerchief, to wipe a goutlet of blood from the edge of his hair.

“These are scarcely parliamentary methods!” he said, and managed a laugh. “But a man--” an enormous increase in his sense of masculine importance appeared in his bearing--“a man, you know, cannot resent such fairy touches from the hand of a lady. He is bound to consider such attentions a compliment. I have been flattered beyond my deserts. But I cannot be mistaken in thinking that I have brought love and caresses this morning to the wrong market, and so, with your permission, I will withdraw. Until another day, Camilla, when you feel more kindly disposed. No, my Camilla, I shall not forget you. I think I can promise in all sincerity not to forget.”

He got to the door a little hurriedly, but with the hope that he had not come off so very badly after all.

Once out of the house, the little future man of the world took a deep lungful of the free air. The thumb he presently slipped through his armhole, while with the other hand he swung his cane, expressed as far as it could the enrichment he felt in the knowledge of women gained that morning. Hero of a scene of jealousy! But who would have dreamed that a well-brought-up girl...? He delicately touched his temple to see whether it still bled.

Camilla had thrown herself into one of the shrouded arm-chairs. The scene had not been what she intended. One thing after the other--finally that ferocious need to get her fingers among his hair--had interfered. But she regretted nothing, though not unaware of having, to produce her grand effect, torn off a part of herself and thrown it to the crows. She would bleed, and she would miss it; still, for the moment she regretted nothing.

* * * * *

She never saw Giulio again, to speak to him. As she did not even pass him on the street for a year or two (and pretend not to know him!) she supposed him in Zurich. Often, in the night, for ever so long after their parting, her heart would be caught as if in a screw by the remembrance of the past. Shame would burn her for her lapses from a becoming rigor. There had been a kiss or two, after all. Unpractical longing for everything to have been different, or else for everything by some wonderful twist of fortune still to turn out well, and she and Giulio be together again, would wring tears from her. But in her saner moments she understood that there was no hope of that, and simply cried into her pillow because she could not get Giulio out of her blood.

But time passed. Many things happened. She grew up. When finally one day she did run into Giulio on the street (and pretend not to know him!) nothing stirred in her heart at sight of the old love. She smiled with pity for her honest ardor of the old days, and its innocent avowal.

Her dream of the future had changed. In the present dream, which naturally contained love along with riches and glory, it was always love that she received, love lavished in Arabian Nights’ baskets of jewels at her feet. All her part was condescension. This was the work of Giulio--the inconstant. Never again should a man hold her in his hand, to feel and suffer in dependence upon him. She would have all the power herself.

* * * * *

It was the school-boy Giulio still at work when, as Princess Elaguine, in Paris, she showed herself so willing to be amused by men, and so resolved not to give any man the chance to make her miserable.

[5] The writer is speaking of that Camilla, once obscure companion and secretary to Mrs. Northmere, the author, and later her heir, some of whose adventures have been told in these pages. See “Mrs. Northmere’s Treasure,” in ~The Century~ for August, 1910, and “What Camilla did with Her Money,” in ~The Century~ for January, 1911.

THE HIGH TIDE AT GETTYSBURG[6]

BY WILL H. THOMPSON

(Of the Fourth Georgia, Doles’s Brigade, Rodes’s Division, Ewell’s Corps.)

A cloud possessed the hollow field,
The gathering battle’s smoky shield.
Athwart the gloom the lightning flashed,
And through the cloud some horsemen dashed,
And from the heights the thunder pealed.

Then at the brief command of Lee
Moved out that matchless infantry,
With Pickett leading grandly down,
To rush against the roaring crown
Of those dread heights of destiny.

Far heard above the angry guns
A cry across the tumult runs,--
The voice that rang through Shiloh’s woods
And Chickamauga’s solitudes,
The fierce South cheering on her sons!

Ah, how the withering tempest blew
Against the front of Pettigrew!
A khamsin wind that scorched and singed
Like that infernal flame that fringed
The British squares at Waterloo!

A thousand fell where Kemper led;
A thousand died where Garnett bled:
In blinding flame and strangling smoke
The remnant through the batteries broke
And crossed the works with Armistead.

“Once more in Glory’s van with me!”
Virginia cried to Tennessee:
“We two together, come what may,
Shall stand upon these works to-day!”
(The reddest day in history.)

“IN VAIN VIRGINIA CHARGED AND RAGED, A TIGRESS IN HER WRATH UNCAGED”]

Brave Tennessee! In reckless way
Virginia heard her comrade say:
“Close round this rent and riddled rag!”
What time she set her battle-flag
Amid the guns of Doubleday.

But who shall break the guards that wait
Before the awful face of Fate?
The tattered standards of the South
Were shriveled at the cannon’s mouth,
And all her hopes were desolate.

In vain the Tennesseean set
His breast against the bayonet!
In vain Virginia charged and raged,
A tigress in her wrath uncaged,
Till all the hill was red and wet!

Above the bayonets, mixed and crossed,
Men saw a gray, gigantic ghost
Receding through the battle-cloud,
And heard across the tempest loud
The death-cry of a nation lost!

The brave went down! Without disgrace
They leaped to Ruin’s red embrace.
They only heard Fame’s thunders wake,
And saw the dazzling sunburst break
In smiles on Glory’s bloody face!

They fell, who lifted up a hand
And bade the sun in heaven to stand!
They smote and fell, who set the bars
Against the progress of the stars,
And stayed the march of Motherland!

They stood, who saw the future come
On through the fight’s delirium!
They smote and stood, who held the hope
Of nations on that slippery slope
Amid the cheers of Christendom!

God lives! He forged the iron will
That clutched and held that trembling hill.
God lives and reigns! He built and lent
The heights for Freedom’s battlement
Where floats her flag in triumph still!

Fold up the banners! Smelt the guns!
Love rules. Her gentler purpose runs.
A mighty mother turns in tears
The pages of her battle years,
Lamenting all her fallen sons!

[6] First printed in ~The Century~ for July, 1888.

T. TEMBAROM

BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

Author of “That Lass o’ Lowrie’s,” “The Shuttle,” etc.

WITH DECORATIVE PICTURES BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN