Chapter VI: Non Dolce Far Niente

And so we reach a situation which, having no least authority to complicate itself, must suffice us in its simplicity to the end. It is a situation as old as the human drama; it has formed the groundwork for a thousand tales of passion and infidelity, more fierce, more involved than this that I relate; it embraces for its essentials but three characters, the lady, and the diffident lover, and the false friend. Yet, although our version may not rank in poignancy with the tragedy of the Rimini, or in homeliness with the courtship of Miles Standish, it can claim for its main details that virtue of truth which ennobles even little calamities above the finest ecstacies of the imagination.

It is into a brief idyll of love and summer, then, that we are now to penetrate. Would it might begin and end there in the green gardens--to flow, in Tennyson’s words:

“... sweetly on and on,
Calming itself to the long-wished-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.”

But, alas! though the spirit of romance plead to us, soft as his loveliest temptress to St. Anthony, our historical conscience must remain cold and deaf to its entreaties. As things happened, so must they be recorded.

The lady, and the lover, and the false friend. It is such a simple tale, and so haunted by precedent, that the least sophisticated reader, given these premises, could surely write it for himself. Only remember that no such friend was ever false by design. Nor was this one. He began by detesting his task, not from conscientious motives, but because he went into it branded by the wounding stigma of her who was its object. He knew in what comparative light she would regard his advocacy; and he knew that in his own conscious acceptance of that estimate was foretold the failure of his mission. What value were to be attached to the praises of such a man?--so would run her thoughts. To be belauded by him were to be implied despicable. So he would only end by confirming the very complaint he was sent to alleviate--and serve those right who had commissioned him. It would do them no harm to learn that to strain devotion too far were to have it snap and recoil on themselves. At this beginning of things he really believed that he hated the young Infanta--a sentiment certainly little conducive to the successful accomplishment of his business.

And it did nothing to put him on better terms with himself to realise with what contemptuous confidence he was delegated to this task. Joseph or Philip--it was all the same moral of princely omnipotence. He was with both of them just the insensate instrument, to be played upon, to evoke certain emotions at command, and then to be dispensed with as a mere mechanical agent that had served its purpose. That he might prove a self-conscious agent, possessing feelings and passions of his own, never seemed to occur to either of them as remotely conceivable. He was just turned loose into the green pastures of Colorno, as a lowly steer might be entrusted to the company of a pedigree heifer--entrusted to excite her interest, that is to say, in the royal bull which was to succeed him by and by.

He laughed, putting that image to himself; yet really it was a not exaggerated one. Only, apart from the pledges of so-called friendship, he was doubtful of his own capacity to excite. If the lady started with a prejudice, he started with a grudge, and the two between them seemed inimical to a right sentimental understanding. Supposing panegyric were merely to react through him upon its subject? In that case the logical course would be to represent Joseph as undesirable. Yet he hardly dared to risk such a chance. No, he would be faithful to his mission, and, if that failed--well, _he_ had not been the one to initiate the business of the green intaglio. They must fight it out among themselves.

And in the meanwhile he would act according to his lights. For some days after his installation at the palace he was scrupulous in obliterating himself so far as Isabella was concerned. He saw the marquise privately, and took pains to convince her, against her more truculent judgment, that his policy for the moment lay in self-effacement. Time and opportunity, he said, would best decide the manner of his next approach. He brought her to agree with him, the more easily as that old intriguing bosom could yet find, in the attentions of a personable male creature, the shadow of an ancient thrill. She admired his bright volubility--for, the chevalier’s tongue once loosened, he gave it full exercise--she admired his romantic looks and more romantic songs. They were all for her for this time being; and for her the frank confidence which confessed, confirming her suspicions, the true purpose of his mission. They were conspirators together, very humorous and understanding.

In truth, the man did not know how to begin. That unforeseen antipathy seemed to blight his inspiration, and he was glad of the respite. He spent much of his time, while so temporising, in wandering about the spacious grounds. They were fair in the Italian style, with formal walks, and fountains, and colonnades of marble; better still, with remoter green recesses where one might lose oneself amidst flowering thickets, set here and there with sunk gardens and lily-ponds. One morning, when so strolling, he came plump, turning a leafy corner, upon Madame Gonzalès and her young charges. Those were three in all, the two younger, Ferdinand and Louise, sharing, pretty equally between them some fifteen years. These youngsters drove in a little chaise, with a pretty white goat to draw it, and Isabelita walked smiling at the head. Tiretta saw the smile fade and the slender figure stiffen in the moment of his appearance. He bit his lip, as he stopped to greet the cavalcade with a bow.

“Ah, monsieur!” cried the marquise, with a quick wrathful glance at the young lady; “this is well encountered. We are all hot and tired, and would welcome someone who would amuse us.”

They had halted near a rustic bench, and thereon the old lady seated herself, fanning her moist face fretfully.

“Charmed,” said Tiretta. “What shall I do--turn Catherine-wheels down the alley, or run after my own tail, like a puppy?”

The little eight-year-old boy laughed gleefully. “Is that your tail, monsieur?” he said, stretching out to touch the chevalier’s sword.

“Like the scorpion’s, I fain would think, young sir,” said Tiretta. “It hath a sting in it for those who would approach it rashly.”

The boy, pulling at the reins, looked up with large indolent eyes. “Woa, Belletto! Stand still, little hog! Are you a soldier, monsieur?”

“I am what they call a soldier of fortune, sir. I fight, when I fight, to vindicate and extol her name, as the Knight of la Mancha fought for his Dulcinea. You have heard of him?”

“Haven’t I, just! But I would rather, for my part, fight for my country.”

Isabelita’s little hand, for all the feigned abstraction of Isabelita’s eyes and thoughts, touched the child’s shoulder approvingly. He looked round at her. “Wouldn’t _you_, Lita?” he said.

“What, dear?” she answered, stooping to him.

“Wouldn’t you rather fight for your country than for Mademoiselle Fortune?”

“Of course, Ferdy. How can you ask such a question?”

“There was never a knight in the world more worthy than this Quixote to wear his spurs,” said Tiretta.

She was impelled to answer him against her will:

“There was never one who despised fortune more, or owed so little to her.”

“I do not despise her,” said Tiretta quietly. “If I did, I could not serve her as disinterestedly as this don served his peerless one. But a man must have his ideal to inspire him, though it be no better than a purse of fairy gold, and though it leave him in the end as poor as he began.”

“My God, what nonsense you all talk!” cried the marquise crossly; “and monsieur is the most wilful of the lot. He is a brave soldier, and he has fought for Spain.”

“Is Spain your country?” asked Ferdinand.

“I fight for fortune--always for fortune, I tell you,” said Tiretta, with an obstinate smile.

The little boy touched his sword again.

“With this, monsieur? Has it killed many people?”

The Gonzalès laughed loudly.

“It has killed one person,” said Tiretta, “whose blood, mademoiselle your sister will likely tell you, has dishonoured it for ever.”

“Whose?” said the child eagerly. “Tell me, monsieur.”

Tiretta drew out the blade--an elastic strip of steel, long toughened by use--and ran his finger along it.

“It belonged,” he said, “to an old friend of mine. I thought him one of the noblest of men; but since, like myself, he was a mere soldier of fortune, that may be nothing but my prejudice. He had fought successfully in a number of causes; but in the cause of self-interest he failed. He had many and grave faults--a persistent craze for gambling; an arrogant temper; a furious hatred of the people. To hear him fulminate, one would have thought he ranked them with the grass--ready, on the least provocation, to mow them down by the acre. But he played straight, while others robbed him; out of his lean purse he pensioned a dishonest rogue grown crippled in his service; his temper never impaired his perfect honour. And, as to his hatred of the people--why here, after all, was the moral of it. He met his death rescuing a drunken old woman, horrible, hideous, debased, from the hands of a party of miscreants. But she was a woman, you understand. That was in Castille; and there I stood by his bedside, and received this weapon from his hands as a last bequest. I have tried to honour it since, but never to such honour as when, in piercing that scoundrel heart, it was used by him nobly to falsify the asserted principles of a lifetime. At least, so, being another soldier of fortune, I regard its distinction.”

He slipped the blade back into its scabbard, while the children, only half understanding him, regarded the act in silent curiosity.

“But _am_ I amusing you?” he cried, with a laugh, to the marquise. “As a soldier of fortune, I could bring many such pretty tales out of my pack.”

“Pooh!” said the old lady impatiently. “Why do you take this perverse pleasure in misrepresenting yourself? We know, monsieur, what we know; and that does not conceive the case of a certain exalted mind stooping to intimacy with a worthless adventurer. There are patrons whose simple favour speaks all that is needed for the high merit of those they distinguish by it.”

“I am not denying it, God forbid, madam,” cried Tiretta. “I would not so dishonour his Highness’s noble character as to pretend it could find pleasure in base friendships. As a prince, he is without littleness; as a man, his instincts always lead him towards the highest.”

“It is so, without question,” said the marquise, nodding her head delightedly.

“Nevertheless,” said Tiretta, “I hold by my title. It hath the warrant of the noblest gentleman ever born of imagination or fact. And so I do not use it in irony or self-depreciation, but as a title to be defended like a king’s.”

“Eh bien!” said madam indulgently; “let it remain, then, as a question of terms. Be to yourself what you will; to us you shall be the knight-errant. Eh, Isabelita?”

“Pray do not ask me, madam,” responded the girl coldly. “I am not a judge of what constitutes a knight-errant.”

She quite foresaw the angry protest her tone would evoke; and yet she would affect no other. Everything this man said offended her. She saw only design and insincerity behind it. This mission he was engaged to fulfil must always be paramount in his mind, and her consciousness of that preoccupation made her suspicious of his every sentiment. She thought it a pity that one so recommended by his looks and soldierly reputation should condescend to lend himself to such finical, rather contemptible practices. But no doubt he had been demoralised by flattery. There was nothing in the world like a fine voice to convert a man into an insufferable coxcomb. The insolence of the light laugh with which he received her snub spoke a whole volume for his impregnable self-complacency. It brought a flush to her cheeks.

But the laugh had in reality spoken no more than a tickle of that humour which accepts its own failures whimsically.

“Stuff and nonsense!” cried the marquise. “You were ready enough with your definitions when you wanted to contradict monsieur. But one can no more produce reason from temper than grapes from a thistle or music from that tree.”

“Cannot one?” said Tiretta, hastily interposing with a droll look. “Ah, but I do not feel so sure!”

There was a knot of frayed bullion hanging from his sword hilt, and, picking delicately, he unwound from it a single strand of gold wire a yard or so in length. This, after testing, he carried to a branch that overhung the walk, and, fitting it taut within a natural bow made by the wood, contrived a tonic resonant string, which, daintily touched, answered to his manipulation like that of a fairy guitar.

“Now,” he said, his head bent to the string and his fingers lightly caressing it? “shall we see if the little tree will sing to us?”

“Yes, yes!” cried the children breathlessly.

“You must be very quiet,” he said. “It will speak, if it speaks at all, so soft and shy that a sound would frighten it.”

They sat as dumb as mice--as dumb as the hot motionless air about them. And presently his fingers moved--the merest phantom of music; and in the low phantom of a voice he took up their tale:

“What music in the little tree?
The wind, the bird, the humming-bee.
They yield their secrets up, and sing
With tirra-lirra down my string.

The cricket with his shrilling call,
The little cheeping mouse and all,
They skip and dance like anything
As ‘tirra-lirra’ sounds my string.

Then ‘Tap!’ the hidden wood-chuck. Hark
His tiny baton on the bark!
And nightingale stands up to sing
His tirra-lirra down my string.”

The wire snapped, and the singer threw up his arms with a resigning laugh.

“More, more!” cried the children delightedly; and the _gouvernante_ applauded with all her might: “Brava, bravissima! It was the most perfect, the most wonderful thing!”

It was wonderful really. This man had the inexplicable gift. He could have produced music out of a key, or a saucepan-lid, or an old shoe, like Paganini or some other. He seemed to think in it, and the appropriate words fitted themselves rhythmically to the sounds. It was all done without the least appearance of effort; and there was the woodpecker’s tap and the nightingale’s trill unmistakable in their context. Of course the verse given is an adaptation, and I daresay a bad one, of the original; but it supplies the sense.

Isabella was moved, as she could hardly fail to be. Certainly his voice was a beautiful one--she would grant him that. He had the right to be conceited about it--if he was conceited. But she felt all at once a doubt. He had sung so prettily and naturally, and solely for the children’s sake. Perhaps, after all, what she had thought the confident effrontery of his manner betokened no more than the conscious independence of a free spirit. He would not be overruled, she remembered, about his self-imposed title. That hardly looked like conceit. If she could only believe a little in his personal genuineness, she might excuse him more. It was something in his favour, at least, that he had undertaken a task so unwelcome as this must be from considerations of pure friendship. Yet had he done so? He was a soldier of fortune--he himself had declared it--and the lure he followed must always and necessarily be a golden one.

And straight, on the thought, the unwarranted meanness of the accusation so recoiled upon herself as to make her seem, in its silent utterance, the contemptible one. That momentary revulsion of feeling wrought its mood, penitent and characteristic. It was always this affectionate child’s instinct to propitiate where she thought she had hurt; and, if only in thought, thought none the less must plead for absolution.

The little Louise, leaning from her place, had caught the chevalier’s arm in both her own and was nestling her plump cheek against it. That was pretty and significant. It showed he was a man whom children naturally trusted and liked.

“Look,” said the little maid; “that is Lita’s own lily-pond down there. Lita loves lilies.”

He felt the inopportuneness of the allusion, and his lips twitched a trifle as he responded:

“Do you know what water-lilies are, ragazzina? No? They are the little washing basins of the nixies.”

“They do not hold water, monsieur.”

“Ah! we who live on land wash in water, you see; but those who live in the water wash in sunshine. If you look very carefully, you will see they are all full of it.”

A sweet voice spoke to him:

“I am very proud of my pond, monsieur.”

He acknowledged the concession with a little grave inclination of the head: “You have reason to be, Madonna”--and turned and addressed himself to the child again.