Chapter IX: Mila

The mental disturbance which our young painter experienced at that moment was due to two causes, one an absurd sort of jealousy, which had taken possession of him like an attack of fever, with respect to Princess Agatha; the other, a feeling of disquiet, because he had failed to obtain that noble person's approval of his paintings. Of course it was not mere love of gain, the desire to be paid more or less handsomely, which worked upon him thus. So long as he had been engrossed by the fever of production, he had given very little thought to the subject of the signora's personal opinion; he had thought only of succeeding, of satisfying himself; then, having almost succeeded in his own eyes, and having not as yet seen his mysterious patroness, he had wondered, with more hope than alarm, whether he should find enough enlightened judges in that province to establish his reputation upon an undertaking of that sort. In short, he had had so much to do up to the last moment that he had not had time to analyze his anxiety.

When he was quite alone, he found that he was strangely disturbed by the knowledge that people were passing judgment on his work, and that he could not be there. What prevented him? No orders related to his humble position in society, but a poignant false shame, which he did not feel the strength to overcome.

And yet Michel was not cowardly, either as a man or as an artist. Despite his youth he had already reflected deeply concerning his future prospects, and he had already reviewed concisely enough the list of successes and reverses connected with his destiny. Feeling that he was seized with faint-heartedness at the outset, he was surprised, and tried to fight against himself. But the more he questioned himself, the more fully he recognized his weakness, but would not avow its cause. Therefore we will give the reader that information.

At the bottom of this depression and alarm there lay a feeling of uncertainty as to the opinion the princess had formed concerning him. Pier-Angelo had told him that morning that during Sunday her highness had inspected the ball-room; but that, as he was not present, he did not know what she had said. Master Barbagallo, being in ill-humor because of the numerous vexations attendant upon the fête, had spoken very coldly to him on the subject, but had not said that the princess seemed dissatisfied or that she criticised anything. Whereupon honest Pier-Angelo had added, with his usual confidence: "Never fear, she knows what is what. It is impossible that she should not be satisfied beyond what she expected." Michel had surrendered to that confidence without paying much heed to the question whether it was justified. He had said to himself that, even if the princess were not a connoisseur, there would soon be enough connoisseurs about her to guide her judgment.

Moreover, he was afraid of everybody now because he was afraid of the princess. She had looked at him in a way that had completely upset him; but she had said nothing to him; not a word of praise or encouragement had accompanied that glance, which was more than kind, it is true, but for that very reason incomprehensible. And suppose he had been mistaken touching the expression of her face! suppose that, when she thus fixed her lovely, joy-laden eyes upon him, she was thinking of some entirely different person--her lover, perhaps, for she must have a lover, whatever Magnani might say!

At the bare idea Michel felt faint and sick; he fancied that he saw the princess leaning on the arm of the fortunate mortal for whose sake she pretended to entertain no thought of marriage. They were glancing absently at the young painter's work, and smiling as they looked into each other's eyes, as if to say:

"What does it matter to us? nothing is beautiful, nothing exists for us, except ourselves."

Weary of suffering so entirely without reason, Michel thought to conquer and tranquillize himself by adopting a superb resolution.

"I will go to bed," he said to himself, "and sleep like a prince, like a hero, while people are criticising me, disputing and perhaps getting excited about me in yonder palace. To-morrow morning, father will come and wake me, and tell me whether I have won the laurel wreath or have been hissed. What does it matter to me, after all?"

It mattered so little to him, in very truth, that, instead of undressing, he dressed to go to the ball. In a most extraordinary fit of abstraction, he arranged his beautiful hair, which would have been a bit too long for a strictly fashionable patrician, but which formed a beautiful frame for his intelligent and impassioned face. He removed with the greatest care all traces of toil; he donned his finest linen and his best clothes; and when he had glanced at his little mirror, he decided, and with good reason, that no guest at the princess's ball would present a more distinguished figure than he.

Having thus prepared for bed, he left the house, and when he had taken ten steps out of doors, he discovered that an inexplicable preoccupation was leading him in the direction of the Palmarosa palace. Indignant with himself, he returned, took off his coat, tossed it on the bed, opened his window and sat beside it, torn between the heroic determination to retire and the irresistible temptation to go and witness the fête.

The countless lights of the palace twinkled before his eyes, the notes of the orchestra reached his ears through the echoing night. Carriages were rolling in all directions; no one was asleep in the city or the outlying country. Indeed, it was not nine o'clock, and Michel felt little inclined to sleep. He closed his window and started to take up a book; but the cyclamen, which he had tossed upon the table in an outburst of anger against himself, was the only object within his reach.

Thereupon it seemed to him that, through the delicate and penetrating odor of musk exhaled by the pink-tipped petals of that pretty little flower, he saw palpable images take shape and gather about him. Women, lights, flowers, gushing waters, diamonds with a bluish gleam; and with the things which seemed real, fanciful things were mingled as in a dream. Lovely dancing-girls of antique times, whom Michel had painted on the ceiling, stood forth gracefully from the canvas, and, raising their azure and purple tunics above their knees, glided through the crowd, and cast upon him as they passed lewd glances and mysterious smiles. Drunk with desire, he followed them, and lost them, and found them again, seizing one by her floating girdle, another by her transparent _peplum_, but exhausting himself in vain efforts, in vain entreaties, to detain them and give them substance.

Then a white female passed slowly and took sole possession of his vagrant passion. She stopped in front of him and gazed at him, at first with stony eyes, which gradually became animated and ended by flashing flames, whereby he felt that he was being consumed. Lying motionless at her feet, he saw her stoop over him. He fancied that he felt her breath upon his brow; but instantly the giddy band of Latin harlots entangled him in a network of multi-colored tunics and whirled him upward toward the ceiling. Then he found himself alone on his ladder, smeared with paint, covered with dirt, exhausted, gasping for breath, in a ghastly solitude, dimly lighted by a vague gleam of daylight. Silence hovered over the cold, deserted rooms; naught remained of his vision save a little broken flower, whose fragrance he had exhausted by inhaling it.

This hallucination became so painful that Michel, in terror, pushed the cyclamen away once more, thinking that there must be something soporific or poisonous in its exhalations. But he could not make up his mind to destroy it. He placed it in a glass of water and opened his window again.

"Why suffer thus without reason and without any object?" he said to himself; "is it a woman's glance, or the distant view of a great fête, that makes my disordered imagination run riot thus? Very well! if the mad creature is untamable, let her have her way; doubtless the spectacle of what really is will either extinguish her frenzy or furnish it with fresh food. I shall either become calm, or suffer in some new way; what does it matter!"

"What is the trouble, that you are talking to yourself so, Michel?" said a soft voice, while at the same time the door of his little chamber opened behind him. And Michel, turning his head, saw his little sister Mila, who approached him on tiptoe, with bare feet and her body wrapped in a _piddemia_--a brown cloak worn by the women of the people.

No one in the world was so pretty, so sweet, and so lovable as Mila. Michel had always loved her dearly. And yet her appearance at that moment caused him some vexation.

"What are you doing here, little one?" he said; "why aren't you asleep?"

"Asleep already!" she said, "when I hear carriages rumbling through the streets and see the princess's palace shining yonder like a star? Oh! I cannot sleep! Our father made me promise to go to bed as usual, and not to go running about the palace with the other girls, to try to look at the fête through the open doors. So I went to bed, and although those violins, which you can hear from here, made my heart beat time, I was determined to go to sleep, when my friend Nenna came and asked me to go with her."

"And you mean to go, Mila? to disobey your father? to loiter about that house, which is all surrounded by servants, beggars and vagabonds, with a hare-brained creature like Nenna? You shall not do it, I forbid you!"

"Oh! you needn't put on those high and mighty paternal airs, my dear brother," retorted Mila, in an offended tone. "Do you suppose I am mad enough to listen to Nenna? I sent her away; she is a long way from here, and I was going to sleep again when I heard you walking about and talking. I thought father was with you; but I saw through the crack of the door that you were alone, and then ----"

"Then you came in here to chatter, in order to avoid going to sleep, eh?"

"It is true that I have no desire to go to bed so early, and father didn't forbid me to listen and look on from a distance at what is going on up there! Oh! how beautiful it must be! You can see much better from your window than from mine, Michel; do let me feast my eyes on that beautiful bright light!"

"No, little one. The wind is cool to-night, and you have almost no clothes on. I am going to shut the window and go to bed. Go and do the same; good-night."

"You are going to bed; and have just dressed yourself! what did you do it for, pray? Michel, you are deceiving me, you are going to see the ball, you are going in! I will bet that you are invited, and that you won't tell me so!"

"Invited! they don't invite people like us to such grand affairs, my poor dear! When we enter that palace, we go as workmen, not as friends."

"What difference does that make, so long as you're there? Then you are going? Oh! how I would like to be in your place!"

"Why, what is the meaning of this frantic desire to see this fête?"

"To see what is beautiful, Michel, isn't that all? When you draw a beautiful figure, I take more pleasure in looking at it, perhaps, than you do who drew it."

"But if you were there, it would be on condition that you were hidden in some hole, for if they saw you, they would turn you out; you could not even show yourself, much less dance!"

"Very true; but I should see the others dance, and that would be much."

"You are a child. Good-night."

"I see that you aren't willing to take me!"

"No, surely not; I can't. They would turn you out, and I should have to break the head of some insolent lackey for insulting you when you were on my arm."

"What! isn't there some little corner no bigger than your hand, where I could hide? I am so small! Look, Michel, I could get into your cupboard. Anyway, you could take me to the door without taking me in, and father would not be angry to know that I was there with you."

Michel preached a beautiful sermon to Mila on the subject of childish curiosity, and the violent instinctive longing which she felt to intoxicate herself with the spectacle of patrician grandeur. He forgot that he was consumed by the same longing, and that he was anxious to be alone so that he might give way to it.

Mila listened to reason when Michel told her that he was going to assist his father to overlook the decorations of the ball; but she heaved a deep sigh, none the less.

"Well," she said, tearing herself away from the window, "it's no use to think any more about it. However, it's my own fault; for if I had had any idea that I should be so wild to go, I could very easily have asked the princess to invite me."

"Now you are going mad again, just as I thought you were becoming reasonable, Mila! As if the princess could have invited you, even if she had taken it into her head to do it!"

"Why, of course she could; isn't she the mistress of her own house?"

"Even so! what would all those ancient dowagers, all those august blockheads say, if they should see little Mila, with her velvet jacket and striped skirt, dancing about among their noble dolls of daughters?"

"Let me tell you, that I might perhaps cut a better figure than all of them, young and old!"

"That is no reason."

"I know that; but the princess is a queen in her house, and I will bet that she will invite me to the first ball she chooses to give."

"You will ask her to, I suppose?"

"To be sure! I know her, and she is very fond of me; she is a friend of mine."

As she said this, Mila drew herself up and assumed an air of importance, so comical and so fascinating that Michel laughed and kissed her.

"I like to see, Mila," he said, "that you have no suspicion of anything. And why should I deceive you? You will lose soon enough the trustful illusions of your age of gold! But, since you know this beautiful princess so well, pray tell me something about her, my dear little sister; tell me how it happens that you are so intimately acquainted with her, without my knowing anything about it?"

"Aha! Michel, you are curious to know that, now! But since you have shown so little eagerness to question me, you will kindly wait a little longer, until it pleases me to answer you."

"So it's a secret, is it?"

"Perhaps! what do you care?"

"I care very little, in truth, to know anything whatsoever concerning this princess. She has a fine palace, I work there, she pays me, and I care little about anything else for the moment. But nothing that interests my little Mila can be indifferent to me, nor should it be hidden from me, in my opinion."

"Now you are flattering me to make me speak. Well, I will not speak, there! But I will show you something that will make you open your eyes. See, what do you say to this pretty thing?"

And Mila took from her bosom a locket surrounded by large diamonds.

"They are fine stones," she said, "and worth I don't know how much money. Enough to provide me with a marriage portion if I chose to sell them; but I will never part with them, because they came from my best friend."

"And that friend is the Princess of Palmarosa?"

"Yes, Agatha Palmarosa; don't you see her cipher engraved on the gold of the locket?"

"Yes, that is true! But what is there inside this priceless trinket?"

"Hair, lovely light chestnut hair, with a touch of gold, naturally curly, and so fine!" said the girl, opening the locket. "Isn't it soft and glossy?"

"That isn't the princess's, for hers is black."

"So you have seen her, after all?"

"Yes, I just caught a glimpse of her. But tell me, Mila, whose hair you wear against your heart, and in such a valuable locket?"

"How inquisitive you are! you are blind and dull, too, like all inquisitive people. Don't you recognize it? Don't you remember where I got it?"

"No, indeed, I do not."

"Well, put it against yours and you will recognize it, although your head has grown a little darker in a year."

"Dear little sister! yes, I do remember now that you cut it from my head the day you left Rome--and you have kept it all this time!"

"I used to carry it in a little black bag. My friend Agatha asked of what saint I carried a relic in my scapulary, and when I told her that it was my darling and only brother's hair, she took it and said she would send it back to me the next day; and the next day she sent me by father this lovely locket filled with your hair. However, some of it was missing. The jeweller who put it inside either stole it or lost it."

"Lost it, that may be," said Michel, with a smile; "but as for stealing it! This hair has no value to anyone but you, Mila!"