Chapter XVII: The Lost Presence

It is a pathetic paradox that we never truly acquire anything until we have lost it. To possess rightly what is ours we must be deprived of it, must come to view it down the perspectives of the past and gone, to enable us to get its real proportions into focus. That would seem to imply that, as the mystics teach us, matter is the illusion and imagination the reality, since loss opens our mental vision to a thousand truths, to which while possessing them we were blind. The miser, robbed and pauperised, realises too late the countless opportunities for happiness he has forgone; the desolated lover knows at last the devotion which risked death to pleasure him, rather than deny to the lesser faith that proof which, to its own, more strong and pure, was inessential. So it often is that to die is to live for the first time as one’s true self, even in the hearts of those who cherished us.

Ah, death, who clears the vision; in whom all revealed truths corradiate--give us back the child, the friend, the lover, whose worth we never really estimated until you opened our eyes to all that it had meant to us. The qualities we were impatient of because we could not understand; the motives we misinterpreted; even the small vitalities that often worried us, got in our way, seemed importunate and tiresome--what would we not give at last to hear again one tone of the insistent voice, to feel again one touch of the restless hands, whose very tyranny expressed a fearless confidence in the love that would not see. But it may not be; our knowledge comes in loss; and were these to be restored to us, the veil of flesh would again close in and blind our vision to their truth.

That lost presence! If with all our memory of its faults it can figure so ineffably dear to us, be so comprehended at last for its lovely indispensability, how must it live in a heart which has never learned to associate anything with it but the gentlest perfection of form and nature. So the widowed heart of Tiretta regarded its deprivation. With him the larger knowledge was but as the knowledge of a transfiguration from Love the saint to Love the goddess.

At first he could not realise that she was gone--even from the house that her voice and light step had made so beautiful. That she could have gone out of his life would have seemed a desolation too monstrous for belief. And yet he had known throughout on what a precarious tenure he held his lease of light, and how wilfully, how infatuatedly he had blinded his soul to its impermanence.

It could not but be blinded still, while the glamour of that last meeting hung in his brain like an intoxicating incense. In his ecstasy of sure possession there was no room at the moment for doubts and apprehensions. It was only when he came fully to grasp the fact that, in the official view, he was wholly done with her, that she had been taken from him like a patient cured, and that no reason existed in the world why they should ever meet again, that a sense of his own incredible position seemed to break in upon him. She was not gone for a day, a week, a month; she was gone, so far as their intimacy was concerned, for ever. Henceforth her august and his obscure destinies separated, to flow continually wider apart; no road of his conceivably led to Parma, where she was established not again to return.

Not to return! He had to grip himself to realise that stupendous fact, to get at last on terms with the conscience he had so long eluded. And then, flowing, flowing in from that outer darkness to which it had been relegated, came the deadly spirit of guilt and remorse; and he awoke to blank amazement of his dream, and whither it had brought him.

Now he had to stand up, a desperate creature, and parley with his soul. What was he going to do in this crisis of his affairs? The just, the expiatory thing, since, mercifully, it might be said, heaven had snatched him from his self-delusion in time to make atonement possible? If hitherto the odds against him had been morally overwhelming, here was the psychologic moment of respite, the breathing, the renewing time, when he could still withdraw with some honour to himself. And so, what of her, sacrificed in her innocent trust, like piteous Iphigenia, to appease the anger of the gods? No, it was unthinkable; he was not hero or coward enough to condemn his own soul to that renunciation, let the gods visit his weakness on his head as they would. To go; to let her believe him faithless, spiritless, believe his love, to which she leaned in wistful confidence, a thing of straw? He could not do it, not though reason pointed to it as the wise and noble course. What had he to do with reason, whose bliss had been in defying it? He had sinned to his friend already beyond redemption; would it mend his salvation to play the traitor to his love?

O, his love--his beautiful love! If it had been madness before to relinquish that dream, how much more impossible was it now, when loss had made of it an immortal ecstacy, had transported it from earth to heaven, had exalted its little Madonna of the white feet to those starry heights where no breath of gross desire might reach her. Now she belonged to him tenfold by right of that immaculateness; he was jealous of her virgin fame, since she was enthroned there by his will--a tender thing, no longer for the rough wounding of man’s passion. Let her thus dwell for ever in the skies, serene and chaste and adorable. The world was free to kneel with him and worship; though her chosen one, he would demand no closer privilege for himself.

But they would not let it be; they had haled her from her heaven, meaning to despoil her; and what alternative had he then but to claim her bodily for his own? Friendship, good faith, policy--what were all these as against his age-long title, the wild mystic compact made in those far green gardens? That was the older, the more binding troth, of which, when he accepted his credentials from the archduke, he had guessed nothing. Now, if honour bound him, it was there. He could not help it if the humour of the thing jumped with his inclination.

He would recognise all this sometimes for the casuistry it was; but mostly, so strangely was the mystic in him blended with the rationalist, it would possess his mind with all the force of an actual memory. But it mattered little, after all, with what he chose to salve his conscience, since, angry or half-healed, he found no solution in it of his difficulties.

Those were to know what to do, now the inevitable, against which he had made no provision, was upon him. He had sung like the improvident grasshopper, and the winter of his rapture found him unprepared. Was it still possible they might communicate, and arrange some plan of action? And, if so, what plan? At the least it must be a mad and a desperate one, staking their all on the cast, hopeless from the first of compromise. Yet he was ready, if she was brave. He must learn that; must force the knowledge somehow. Or would she find means to provide him with it unasked? Not for one moment would he believe in the reality of her asserted reconciliation to her doom. He was as sure of her true heart as he was of his own imperishable constancy. Yet what to do?

He did nothing. As, I opine, all but the resourceful heroes of romance would do under like circumstances, so did he--he temporised.

He could not bring himself to believe, indeed, that their separation was final. He was always in the hope that, the formal betrothal achieved, she would be allowed to return to Colorno; and he was doggedly resolved, pending such blissful restoration, not only to outstay his welcome, but to ignore the broadest and least delicate hints, of which the marquise was not sparing, that he might with advantage to everyone be gone.

His amiable persistency even had its effect at length on the rude old lady; especially when, for diplomacy’s sake, he brought the persuasion of his voice to bear upon her still responsive susceptibilities. The suggestion that, the main theme withdrawn, he could find even freer inspiration for his songs in her ripe understanding came so to captivate her that in the end, from suffering his flatteries, she quite coveted them--and, finally, she made love to him.

Thereat, a little alarmed, he drew back; and perhaps so obviously as to precipitate his own downfall. But of that in a moment.

In the meanwhile he spent the most of his days in wandering about the now desolate grounds, his heart a prey to vain longings and vainer expectations. No word or sign came in all this time to solace or decide him; he walked, the very spirit of loneliness and brooding melancholy, a being most pathetically haunted.

Once he went to Aquaviva’s gardens; and talked graciously with the little Bissy because he was a pet of hers; and spent a sweet sad hour in the orange grove, absorbed in one delirious memory. But mostly he frequented the palace walks, retasting unforgettable delights. He could have kissed her lilies one by one on their open mouths; to stand approximately in her footprints was a fatuous joy to him; often he stole to her vacant windows, and committed his soul to their sweet inaccessible mysteries.

The children he rather avoided. They worried him with their unfeeling prattle. Yet still he lingered on. It could not last much longer; and he knew it could not. But what was to be the end?

He never doubted her love--not for one instant. He pictured her, like himself, waiting, waiting for the deliverance that would not come, for the reunion that hard fate debarred them. She would yield herself to him, she had said, when hope was gone; he had but to call and she would fly to hide herself in his breast. So it was hope that parted them; yet how was he to banish hope and still regain her? It was upon hope he lived.

Once he wove this sorrowful exaltation of his into a rhapsody of love and loss, the sense of which may be rendered in the following lines:

“Once for a thousand years ’twas Spring;
Love reigned, and Death stood still;
The world paused at its burgeoning
Of may and daffodil.

“Like buds from spiring lilies thrown,
Time blossomed over Time;
It seemed, ere yet its sweets were blown,
That earth to heaven would climb--

“It seemed, all wrath, all hate were fled,
And sole bright sense remained;
That something evil had been sped,
And some new knowledge gained.

“Then no fruits were, but endless bliss
Of Love that knew no sting,
And laughed him on from kiss to kiss,
Like bees a’honeying.

“The rains were gone, the skies were blue,
Nor any cloud had birth
Save but to drop a gentle dew
Like balm upon the earth.

“Nor grief nor grievance ere could be
In fields so fair bedight;
And, above, the fields of eternity
Soft blossomed through the night.

“And there the moon, the witch of dreams,
Her web of slumber wrought,
Till in its soft and silken beams
Ten thousand stars were caught.

“And there the moon with shining eyes
Her silken web prepared,
To catch the stars like fireflies,
And kiss them, being snared.

“O! sweet it was in woods and bowers,
And no fear to conceive;
But meal of honey gave the flowers
And dew the cups of eve.

“O! sweet it was. O! sweet it was.
No sweeter could befall,
While love the end was and the cause--
God knows what changed it all!

“A kiss too much, too full a sigh--
The vessel brimméd o’er;
And the creaking wain of Destiny
Moved onwards as before.”

And so he lingered on amidst the golden ruins of his paradise, wondering, as if his brain were stupefied, over what he had done to bring it thus in a moment about his ears.

He was not permitted to wonder long. Whether it were that she soon realised the hollowness of his attentions to herself; or the real peril of his continued presence in the neighbourhood; or, which is most probable, that she was wearied with the whole business, the marquise took steps to make his further stay in the palace impossible to him. Once resolved, she went about the business after her uncompromising fashion. She opened upon him one night without relevance or preface:

“Like Cupid, monsieur, you are everyone’s match-maker, it seems, and nobody’s gallant. And yet sometimes I wonder.”

“Over what, madame?”

“Why as to there being possibly a subtler purpose in your advocacy than you let appear.”

“What purpose, for example?”

“Call it the purpose of the first-fruits, such as it is said our provincial monseigneurs claim on unions to which they give their blessing.”

He drew back as if he had received a blow in the face. But she went on with perfect serenity:

“There was, for instance, that little volage Fanchette--now in Parma with her mistress--whom you made happy with her gentleman.”

“_I_ made happy?”

“Did you not? Or was it only that, having taken your fee, the case resolved itself without your help?”

He rose from his chair, as pale and grim as death.

“What purpose can you have in thus insulting me?” he said.

She gave a high little laugh, quite placid.

“Insult! Such as you! O, I can assure you, monsieur, your methods have not failed to interest us. You have been very discreet; but walls have eyes as well as ears. Do not think I blame you for insisting on your price; such devotion deserves to be paid in kind.”

“You lie,” he said, quite quietly now. “I have only that to say.”

“Eh!” she cried. “It was not for that, then, that you intrigued with her? Or was it possibly that you thought to use the girl as stepping-stone to higher things?”

His amazement showed in his face.

“I have neither used nor abused her,” he said. “I know nothing whatever of her affairs of the heart. It is a base and wicked slander, whoever uttered it. I say so much and no more, because my honour demands it. You will permit me to withdraw, madame. I quit the palace to-night.”

“That is as you please,” she answered, unruffled; and he left her.

He had no alternative, his raging heart assured him. He must go at once, whatever his departure might portend to his hopes. But to stay on here thus vilified, thus enlightened, was impossible. O, into what foul passes had his sin allured him! And that they could have been existing all this time, unsuspected by him, like filthy slums environing the places which her very footsteps had made holy! The thought of them, of himself in such connection, was a profanation to her memory. His soul cried out to him to claim and bear her away, to a purer atmosphere, to a lovelier knowledge--into the white grave mysteries of the North.

Whither first? As he halted a moment, undecided, a palace functionary pursued him with a despatch. He opened it and read. It was from the archduke, recalling him peremptorily to Vienna.