To Leeward Part 3

"Such a special grace!" said the resident Anglo-American Catholics; "he is quite sure to convert her!"

"Such a special grace!" exclaimed the resident Anglo-American Protestants; "she is quite sure to lead him back!"

"Il faut toujours se mefier des saints," remarked Marcantonio's uncle, concerning his nephew.

"Never trust red-haired women," said the man who had stood at the door.

The engagement made a sensation in Rome, a consummation very easily attained, and very little to be desired. In places where the intercourse between young marriageable men and young marriageable women is so constrained as it is in modern Europe, a man's inclinations do not escape comment, and a very small seed of truth grows, beneath the magic incantations of society tea parties, to a very large bush of gossip.

Nevertheless these good people are always astonished when their prophecies are fulfilled, and the bush bears fruit instead of vanishing into emptiness; which shows that there is some capacity left in them for distinguishing truth and untruth. Marcantonio's marriage had long been a subject in every way to the taste of the chatterers, and though Madame de Charleroi had accused her brother of hastiness, for lack of a better reproach, it was nearly a year since his admiration for Miss Carnethy had been first noticed. During that time every particular of her parentage and fortune had been carefully sought after, especially by those who had the least interest in the matter; and the universal verdict had been that the Marchese Carantoni might, could, should, and probably would, marry Miss Leonora Carnethy. And now that the engagement was out, society grunted as a pig may when among the crab-oaks of Perigord he has discovered a particularly fat and unctuous truffle.

Probably the happiest person was Marcantonio himself. He was an honest, whole-souled man, and in his eyes Leonora was altogether the most beautiful, the most accomplished, and the most charming woman in the world. That he expressed himself with so much self-control and propriety when he asked her to marry him was wholly due to the manner of his education and training in the social proprieties. That a man should use any language warmer or less guarded than that of absolutely respectful and distant courtesy toward the lady he intended to make his wife was not conceivable to him. In the privacy of his own rooms he worshipped and adored her with all his might and main, but when he addressed her in person it was as a subject addresses his sovereign; a tone of respectful and submissive reverence and obedience pervaded his actions and his words. He would have pleased a woman who loved sovereignty, better than a woman who dreamed of a sovereign love.

But she was never out of his thoughts, and if he wooed her humbly, he antic.i.p.ated some submission on her part after marriage. He had no idea of always allowing her mind to wander in the strange channels it seemed to prefer. He thought such an intelligence capable of better things, and he determined, half unconsciously at first, and as a matter of course, that Miss Carnethy, the philosopher, should be known before long as the Marchesa Carantoni, the Catholic. Gradually the idea grew upon him, until he saw it as the grand object of his life, the great good deed he was to do. His love consented to it, and was purified and beautified to him in the thought that by it he should lead a great soul like hers to truth and light. He was perfectly in earnest, as he always was in matters of importance; for of all nations and peoples Italians have been most accused of frivolity, heartlessness, and inconstancy, and of all races they perhaps deserve the accusation least. They are the least imaginative people on earth, apart from the creative arts, and the most simple and earnest men in the matter of love. Northern races hate Italians, and they fasten triumphantly on that unlucky Latin sinner who falls first in their way as the prototype of his nation, and as the b.u.t.t of their own prejudice. In the eyes of most northern people all Italians are liars; just as a typical Frenchman calls England "perfide Albion,"

and all Englishmen traitors and thieves. Who shall decide when such doctors disagree? And is it not a proverb that there is honour among thieves?

Marcantonio never spoke of these ideas of his to his friends when they congratulated him on his engagement. He only looked supremely happy, and told every one that he was, which was quite true. But his sister was to him a great difficulty, for she evidently was disappointed and displeased. He debated within himself how he should appease her, and he determined to lay before her his views about Leonora's future. To that intent he visited her in the boudoir, where they had so often talked before the engagement.

Madame de Charleroi received him as usual, but there was a look in her eyes that he was not accustomed to see there,--an expression of protest, just inclining to coldness, which had the effect of rousing his instinct of opposition. With his other friends he had found no occasion for being combative, and his old manner had sufficed; but with his sister he found himself involuntarily preparing for war, though his intentions were in reality pacific enough. Marcantonio was very young, in spite of his nine and twenty years. His manner now, as he met his sister, was a trifle more formal than usual, and he bent his brows and pulled his black moustache as he sat down.

"Carissima Diana," he began, "I must speak with you about my marriage, and many things."

"Yes,--what is it?" asked his sister, calmly, as she turned a piece of tapestry on her knee to finish the end of a needleful of silk.

Marcantonio had somehow expected her to say something that he could take hold of and oppose. Her bland question confused him.

"You are not pleased," he began awkwardly.

"What would you have?" she asked, still busy with her work. "I am sure I told you what I thought about it long ago."

"I want you to change your mind," said Marcantonio, delighted at the first show of opposition. Madame de Charleroi raised her eyebrows, gave a little sigh of annoyance, and turned towards him.

"I will always treat your wife with the highest consideration," she said, as though that settled the matter and she wished to drop the subject. But her brother was not satisfied.

"I wish you to love her, Diana; I wish you to treat her as your sister."

Donna Diana was silent, and Marcantonio shifted his position uneasily, for he did not know exactly what to do, and he saw that he was failing in his mission. But in a moment his heart guided him. He went and sat beside her, and laid his hand on hers.

"We cannot quarrel, dear," he said. "But will you love her if I make her like you--if I make her thoughts as beautiful as yours?"

Donna Diana's face softened as she turned to him and affectionately pressed his hand.

"I will try to love her for your sake, dear boy," she answered gently; and he kissed her fingers in thanks.

"Dear Diana," he said, "you are so good! But you know she is really not at all like what you fancy her. She is full of heart, and so wonderfully delicate and lovely,--and so marvellously intelligent. There is nothing she does not know. She has read all the philosophies"--

"Yes, I know she has," interrupted his sister, as though deprecating the discussion of Miss Carnethy's wisdom.

"But not as you think," he protested, catching the meaning of her tone.

"She has read them all, but she will take what is best from each, and I am quite sure she will be a good Catholic before long."

"I really hope so," said Donna Diana seriously.

"Not that I should love her any the less if she were not," continued Marcantonio, who was loth to feel that there could be any condition to his love. "I should love her just as much if she were a Chinese,--just as much, I am sure. But of course it would be much better."

"Of course," a.s.sented Diana, smiling a little at his enthusiasm.

Somehow the peace was made,--it is so easy to make peace when each can trust the other, and knows it! Just as Madame de Charleroi had determined to say something pleasant on the evening when her brother offered himself to Leonora, so now she made up her mind to stand by Marcantonio, and to help him in his married life by being as sympathetic and as kind as possible.

In due time Marcantonio obtained the permission of the Church to unite himself with his Protestant wife, and after a great many formalities the wedding took place in the late spring, after Easter.

Weddings are tiresome things to talk about, and even the princ.i.p.al persons concerned in them always wish them over as soon as possible.

What can be more trying for a young girl than to be set up to be stared at by the hour, be-feathered and be-rigged in a multiplicity of ornaments, made flimsy with tulle and lace, and ghastly with the acc.u.mulation of white things, when she is pale enough already with the acute fever of an exceedingly complicated state of mind? Or how can a man possibly enjoy being envied, hated, loved, despised, and considered a fool, by his rivals, his bride, the woman he has not married, and his bachelor friends,--all in a breath? It is absurd to suppose that any one with an intelligence above that of the average peac.o.c.k can enjoy playing a leading part in a matrimonial parade.

Marcantonio Carantoni and Leonora Carnethy were married, and one of her intimate friends shed a tear as she observed how extremely empty a form it was. But the other looked a little pale, and said she was quite sure she could have chosen someone "better than that."

CHAPTER IV.

"Needles and pins, needles and pins,"--the rhyme is obvious, and very old,--"When a man marries his trouble begins." Marcantonio is an Italian, and his native language contains no precise equivalent of this piece of wisdom, with which every English baby is made acquainted as soon as it can know anything.

The real difficulty seems to be that there are as many different ways of looking at marriage as there are people in the world. Marriage is described as being either a holy bond or a social contract. Obviously a holy bond implies at least a certain modic.u.m of holiness on the part of the bound; and it is not likely that a single and very simple form of contract can ever cover the multifarious requirements and exigencies of a thousand million human beings. A contract, in order to be satisfactory, must be thoroughly understood and appreciated by the parties who undertake it, and this seems to be a very unusual case in the world.

When Marcantonio Carantoni married, he was possessed of very n.o.ble and exalted ideas, totally unformulated, but, as he supposed, only requiring the seal of experience to define, cement, and consolidate them. He believed that his wife was to be the stately queen of his household, the gentle partner of his deeds and thoughts, a loving listener to his words. He pictured to himself a magnificence of goodness unattainable for a man alone, but within easy reach of a man and a woman together; he imagined a broad perfection of human relations which should be a paradise on earth and an example of beatific possibility to the world.

He dreamed of that kind of happiness, which, as it undoubtedly pa.s.ses the bounds of experience, is aptly termed by poets transcendent, and is regarded by men of the world as a nonsensical fiction. He saw visions in his sleep, and waking believed them real, for he had a great capacity for believing in all that was good; and as he was human he found ceaseless delight in believing in these good things, more especially as in store for himself. He had always been fond of the pleasant side of life, and found no difficulty in conceiving of an infinite series of pleasant situations, culminating in his union with Miss Leonora Carnethy. He never a.n.a.lysed. Only pessimists a.n.a.lyse, and the best they can accomplish thereby is to make other men even as themselves, critical to see the darns in other people's clothes, and learned to spy out infinitesimal mud-specks upon the garments of saints.

Marcantonio was young. There is a faculty which men acquire from mixing with the world, which is not pessimism, nor a.n.a.lysis, nor indifference; it is rather a knowledge of good and evil with a fair appreciation of their proportion in human affairs. Nothing is more necessary to thought than the generalising of laws; nothing is more pernicious than the generalising of humanity into types, the torturing application of the nineteenth century boot to the feet of all,--men, women, and children alike. If men are only interesting for what they are, regardless of what they may be, a day of any one's actual experience must be a thousand times more interesting than all the fictions that ever were written. If art consists in the accurate presentation of detail, then the highest art is the petrifaction of nature, and the wax-works of an anatomical museum are more artistically beautiful than all the marbles of Phidias and Praxiteles. True art depends upon an a priori capacity for distinguishing the beautiful from the ugly, and the grand from the grotesque; and true knowledge of the world lies in the knowledge of good and evil, not confounding the n.o.ble with the ign.o.ble under one smearing of mud, nor yet whitewashing the devil into an ill-gotten reputation for cleanliness. The temptation of Saint Anthony may convey a righteous moral lesson, but the temptation of Saint Anthony as described by his namesake's pig would risk being too unsavoury to be wholesome.

But Marcantonio was young, and he troubled himself about none of these things, supposing everything to be good, beautiful, and enduring, excepting such things as were evidently bad, inasmuch as they were ugly and disagreeable.

Now Miss Leonora Carnethy had long been given over to a sort of sleek, cynic philosophy,--the kind of cynicism that uses lavender water in its tub. Her dissatisfaction with the world was genuine, but she found means to alleviate it in the small luxuries and amenities of her daily life.

She and her friends had talked the kernel out of life, or thought that they had, but the sh.e.l.l was still fresh and well favoured. Leonora herself was indeed subject to moods and fits of real unhappiness, for she was far too intelligent a person not to long for something beautiful, even when she was most convinced that life was ugly. There were times when she dreamed of an ideal man who should win her, and love her, and give her all the happiness she had missed. And again she would dream of the freedom of the earth-bound soul from ills, and cares, and thorns, and she would enter some silent Roman church and kneel for hours before a dimly lighted altar, praying for rest, and peace, and inspiration of holiness. But there was too much poetic feeling in her religious outpourings. If religion is to be poetic, a very little thing will destroy its harmony; some careless sacristan chatting with a crony in the corner of the church, or a couple of thoughtless children wrangling over a half-penny by the door, or any such little thing, destroyed instantly the fair illusion that lay as balm upon her unrestful soul. Religion must be real to every man if it is to stand the test of reality.

Leonora's views of marriage were therefore more or less subject to her moods. There were days, indeed, few and far between, when her better intelligence got the upper hand of the fict.i.tious fabric of so-called philosophy which she had erected for herself. Then for a brief s.p.a.ce she thought of life very much as Marcantonio did, and she contemplated her marriage as a n.o.ble and worthy career,--for marriage is a career to most women of the world. But then, again, all her uncertainty returned twofold upon her, and the only real thing was the dream of love, the vision of a lover, and the hope of a realised pa.s.sion. She was so strong and radiantly human, that from the moment when her mind fell into abeyance the material beauty of life sprang up in her heart, until, being disappointed and cast down through not attaining the end of her pa.s.sionate dreams, she once more sank into a half-religious, half-poetic melancholy. Nevertheless, the strongest element in her character was the desire to be loved, not by every one, but by some one manly man, and loved with all the strength he had, overwhelmingly. Her studies were a refuge when she saw how improbable such a piece of sweet fortune was, and, as might have been expected, they were far from regular and systematic. She read a great deal, especially of such authors as had a reputation for being profound rather than clear, and, as her mind had received no kind of preliminary training, the result was eminently unsatisfactory to herself. To Marcantonio, who knew more about the opera than about philosophy, she seemed a miracle of learning, and she loved to talk with him about theories, generally finding that, in spite of his ignorance, he made extremely sensible remarks upon them. But he always tried to lead her to different subjects, for, in spite of his immense admiration for what he supposed to be her wisdom, he was aware that it seemed very vague, and that it even occasionally bored him.

Leonora had acquired the unfortunate faculty of deceiving herself, and when the fit was upon her she saw things obliquely. In spite of the little p.r.i.c.k of conscience that hurt her when she accepted Marcantonio's offer, she had soon persuaded herself that she loved him, on the principle that, since her "standard" was so very "high," she could not possibly have demeaned herself to accepting a man she did not love. It is a very fine thing to believe that we are so far removed from evil that we cannot do wrong, and therefore that whatever we do is infallibly right, no matter how our instincts may cry out against it. It is a most comforting and comfortable vicious circle which we convert into a crown of glory for ourselves on the smallest provocation. So when Leonora was finally married to Marcantonio, she made herself believe that she loved him, and all her vague theories were temporarily cast aside and trampled upon in her determination to realise in him all the happiness she had dreamed of in her ideal.

She had got a husband who did most truly love her, and whose one and absorbing thought would be her happiness, but he was not exactly what she had longed for. She mistook his courtesy for coldness, and his deference for indifference, and since she had persuaded herself that she loved him she wanted to find him a perfect fiery volcano of love and jealousy. Marcantonio was nothing of the kind; he was calm, courteous, and affectionate; he had not the slightest cause for jealousy, and, not in the least understanding his wife, he was perfectly happy.

Of all tests of true love a honeymoon is the severest, and by every right of sensible sequence ought to come last of all in the history of married couples. It is the great destroyer of illusions, and the more illusions there are the greater the destruction. Two people have seen each other occasionally, perhaps for an hour every day,--and that is a great deal in Europe,--during which meetings they have become more or less deeply enamoured, each of the qualities of the other. People notoriously behave very differently to the people they love and to the world at large; but their behaviour to the world at large is the outcome of their character, whereas their conduct to each other is the result, or the concomitant, of a pa.s.sion which may or may not be real, profound, and good. But each has a great number of characteristics which practically never appear during those hours of courtship. Suddenly the two are married, and the lid of Pandora's box is hoisted high with a vicious jerk that scares the little imps inside to the verge of distraction, and they fly out incontinent, with an ill savour. If the lid had been gently raised, the evil spirits would probably have issued forth stealthily, and one at a time, without any great fuss, and might not have been noticed. The two condemned ones travel together, eat together, talk together, until in a single month they have exhausted a list of bad qualities that should have lasted at least half a dozen years under ordinary circ.u.mstances.

Marcantonio and Leonora travelled for a time, and at last agreed to spend the remainder of the summer in some quiet seaside place in Southern Italy. They soon discovered the fallacy of wandering about Europe with a maid and a quant.i.ty of luggage, and they both hoped that under the clear sky of the south they might find exactly what they wanted. So they gravitated to Sorrento and hired a villa overhanging the sea, and Marcantonio suggested vaguely that they might have some one to stay with them if they found it dull. At this Leonora felt injured. The idea of his finding life dull in her company!

"How can you possibly suggest such a thing?" she asked, in a hurt tone.

"Not for myself, my dear," said Marcantonio, with an affectionate smile.

"It struck me that you might not find it very amusing. I could never find it dull where you are, ma bien aimee." And indeed he never did.