Chapter 4

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_ CHAPTER IV

Half-an-hour later Giovanni Severi entered the gate below in civilian's dress and asked if he could see Madame Bernard, the French teacher, who had let him know that she was stopping in the palace. The porter told him to ring at the right-hand door on the second landing, but added that it was doubtful whether any one would let him in, as there was 'confusion in the house.'

Madame Bernard was waiting for him, however; he had arrived punctually and she let him in herself.

'Have you heard, Monsieur?' she asked, before he could speak. 'Do you know what is happening?'

'Yes,' he answered. 'All Rome knows it by this time, for the story was in the morning papers. May I see Donna Angela?'

'Come, Monsieur.'

She had fastened the outer door while he was speaking, and she now led the way without any more words.

Angela knew Giovanni's step at a distance, and when he entered she was standing in the middle of the room. He had never before seen her in black, and she was paler than usual; he looked anxiously into her face as he took her hand, and she, meeting his eyes expectantly, saw a change in them. Neither Angela nor Severi spoke at first, and in the silence Madame Bernard passed them and went into the next room, shutting the door after her.

'Have you heard?' Angela asked, still standing and still holding Giovanni's hand.

'Yes. It is in all the papers to-day. There is an outcry. If your aunt shows herself in the streets she will be hissed. But she has the law on her side. I have been to two lawyers to inquire.'

He spoke in short sentences, nervously, and when he stopped he bit his moustache.

'There is something else,' Angela answered. 'I see it in your eyes. There is something I do not know, some still worse news. Sit down there by the fire opposite me and tell me everything, for I am not afraid. Nothing can frighten me now.'

She seated herself where she had sat more than half the day, and he took the chair to which she had pointed. She poked the small green logs with the antiquated tongs and watched the sparks that flew upwards with every touch while she waited for him to speak. But he looked at her in silence, forgetting everything for a while except that he was really alone with her, almost for the first time in his life. He changed his position and bent forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, so that he was nearer to her. Without turning her face from the fire she saw him in a side-glance, but made no answering motion.

'Tell me what it is,' she said softly. 'Only one thing could hurt me now.'

'It is hard to tell,' he answered in rather a dull voice.

She misunderstood, and turned to him slowly with wondering and frightened eyes. Her hand weakened, without quite losing its hold, and the ends of the clumsy tongs clattered on the brick hearth. The doubt that had sprung upon her like a living thing as soon as she saw him, began to dig its claws into her heart.

'If it is so hard to tell,' she said, 'it must be that one thing.' She turned resolutely to the fire again. 'If it is to be good-bye, please go away quietly and leave me alone.'

The words were not all spoken before he had caught her arm, so suddenly that the old tongs fell on the bricks with a clang. Like him, she had been leaning forward in her low chair, and as he drew her to him she involuntarily slipped from her seat and found herself kneeling on one knee beside him. She gave a little cry, more of surprise than of displeasure or timidity, but he did not heed her. It was the first time they had ever been left alone together, and while he still held her with his right hand his left stole round her neck, to bring her face nearer.

But she resisted him almost fiercely; she set both her hands against his chest and pushed herself from him with all her might, and the red blush rose even to her forehead at the thought of the kiss she almost saw on his lips, a kiss that hers had never felt. He meant nothing against her will, and when he felt that she was matching her girl's strength against his, as if she feared him, his arms relaxed and he let her go. She sprang to her feet like a young animal released, and leaned against the mantelpiece breathing hard, and fixing her burning eyes on the old engraving of Saint Ursula, asleep in a queer four-post bedstead with her crown at her feet, that hung over the fireplace. But instead of rising to stand beside her, Giovanni leaned back in his chair, his hands crossed over one knee; and instead of looking up to her face, he gazed steadily down at the hem of her long black skirt, where it lay motionless across the wolf's skin that served for a hearth-rug.

'What is it?' she asked, after a long pause, and rather unsteadily.

He understood that she was going back to the question she had asked him at first, but still he did not answer. She kept her eyes steadily on Saint Ursula while she spoke again.

'If it is not good-bye, what is it that is so hard to say?'

'I have had a long talk with my father.'

Angela moved a little and looked down at his bent head, for he spoke in an almost despairing tone. She thought she understood him at last.

'He will not hear of our marriage, now that I am a beggar,' she said, prompting him.

But Giovanni raised his face at once, and rather proudly.

'You are unjust to him,' he said. 'He is not changed. It is a very different matter. He has had a great misfortune, and has lost almost all he had, without much hope of recovering anything. We were very well off, and I should have had a right to marry you, though you had not a penny, if this had not happened. As it is, my father is left with nothing but his General's pension to support my mother. My brothers will both need help for years to come, for they are much younger than I am, and I must live on my pay if I mean to stay in the service.'

'Is that all?' Angela's voice trembled a little.

'Yes, my pay, and nothing more----'

'I did not mean that,' she hastened to say, interrupting him, and there was a note of returning gladness in her voice. 'I meant to ask if that was all the bad news.'

'It is enough, surely, since it half ruins our lives! What right have I to ask you to keep your promise and marry me, since I have not enough for us to live on?'

Angela turned quite towards him now and repeated his own words.

'And what right have I to ask you to keep your promise and marry me? When you gave your word, you thought I had a great name and was heir to a splendid fortune. You were deceived. I am a "destitute foundling"--the lawyers have proved it, and the proof of their proofs is that I am obliged to accept the charity of my old governess, God bless her! If ever a man had a right to take back his word, you have. Take it, if you will. You are free!'

Giovanni stood up beside her, almost angry.

'Do you think I wanted your fortune?' he asked, a little pale under his tan.

'Do you think I am afraid of poverty?'

Her lips were still parted in a smile after she had asked the question, and with the gesture of an older woman she tapped his arm half reproachfully. The colour came back to his brown face.

'I fear poverty for you,' he answered, 'and I am going to fight it for your sake if you have the courage to wait for me. Have you?'

'I will wait for ever,' she said simply as she laid her hand in his.

'Then I shall leave the army at once,' he replied. 'So far, I have made what is called a good career, but promotion is slow and the pay is wretched until a man is very high up. An artillery officer is an engineer, you know, and a military engineer can always find well-paid work, especially if he is an electrician, as I am. In two years I promise you that we shall be able to marry and be at least comfortable, and there is no reason why I should not make a fortune quite equal to what my father has lost.'

He spoke with the perfect confidence of a gifted and sanguine man, sure of his own powers, and his words pleased her. Perhaps what had attracted her most in him from the beginning had been his enthusiasm and healthy faith in the world, which had contrasted brilliantly with her father's pessimism and bigoted political necrolatry, if I may coin a word from the Greek to express an old-fashioned Roman's blind worship of the dead past.

Angela was pleased, as any woman would have been, but she protested against what she knew to be a sacrifice.

'No,' she said decidedly, 'you must not give up the army and your career for the sake of making money, even for me. Do no officers marry on their pay? I am sure that many do, and manage very well indeed. You told me not long ago that you were expecting promotion from day to day; and in any case I could not marry you within a year, at the least.'

'If I do not begin working at once, that will be just a year lost,' objected Giovanni.

'A year! Will that make much difference?'

'Why not ten, then? As if a year would not be a century long, while I am waiting for you--as if it were not already half a lifetime since last month, when we told each other the truth! Wait? Yes, if I must; for ever, as you said awhile ago, if there is no other way. But if it can be helped, then not an hour, not a minute! Why should we let happiness pass us by and not take it when we may and can? There is not enough in the world, as it is; and you cannot even pretend that you are generous if you do not take your share, since what fate means for you is useless for any one else! No, dear, no! We will take the fruit there is on the tree, and leave none to rot on the branch after we are gone. Promise to marry me a year from to-day, and leave the rest to me--will you?'

'Yes--but promise me one thing, too. Do not resign to-morrow, nor next week, as I know you mean to do. Take a month to think it over, and to look about you. You are so impulsive--well, so generous--that you are capable of sending in your resignation to-morrow.'

'It is already written,' Giovanni answered. 'I was going to send it in to-night.'

'I knew it! But you must not. Please, please, take a little time--it will be so much wiser. I will wait for you for ever, or I will promise to marry you a year from to-day, even if we have to live on bread and water. Indeed I will! But, at least, be a little cautious! It will be far better to marry on your pay--and you will surely get your captaincy in a few months--than to be stranded without even that, in case you do not find the work you hope for. Don't you see? I am sure it is good advice.'

Giovanni knew that it was, if caution were ever worth practising in human affairs; but that has often been doubted by brave and light-hearted men. Giovanni yielded a little reluctantly. If she had asked him to make it two months instead of one, he would have refused, for it seemed to him intolerable to lose a moment between decision and action, and his thoughts doubled their stride with every step, in a geometrical progression; a moment hence, a minute would be an hour, an hour a month, a month a lifetime. Men have won battles in that temper; but it has sometimes cost them their life.

'I know you are sensible,' Giovanni said, taking Angela's hand between his, 'but it is to please you that I agree to wait a month. It is not because it looks wise, as it does. For one man who succeeds by wisdom, ten win by daring. Who knows what may chance in a month, or what may happen to put out of reach what I could do to-day?'

'Nothing!'

Angela gave her answer with the delicious little smile of superiority which the youngest woman and even the merest girl can wear, when she is sure that she is right and that the man she loves is wrong. It may be only about sewing on a button, or about the weather, or it may concern great issues; but it is always the same when it comes: it exasperates weak men, and the stronger sort like it, as they more especially delight in all that is womanly in woman, from heroic virtue to pathetic weakness.

'Nothing can happen in a month to prevent you from resigning then, as you could to-day,' Angela said confidently.

The faint smile disappeared, and she grew thoughtful, not for herself, but for him, and looked at Saint Ursula again. Her hand still lay in his, on the edge of the mantelpiece, and while she gazed at the engraving she knew that he was looking at her and was moving nearer; she felt that he was going to kiss her, but she did not resist this time though the colour was rising in her throat, and just under the exquisitely shaped petal of peach-blossom on which his eyes were fixed, and which was really only the tip of her ear, though it was so like the leaf of a flower that the scent of the bloom came to his memory when his lips touched the spot at last.

His hand shut closer over hers at the same moment, and hers fluttered under his fingers like a small soft bird; but there was no resistance. He kissed the tip of her ear, and she turned towards him a little; his kiss pressed her cool cheek, and she moved again; their eyes met, very near, and dark, and full of light, and then his lips touched hers at last.

Destiny has many disguises and many moods. Sometimes, as on that day at the telephone, the unexpected leaps up from its hiding-place and strikes stunning blows, right and left, like Orestes among the steers in Tauris, or a maniac let loose among sane men; but sometimes Fate lurks in her lair, silently poring over the tablets of the future, and she notes all we say, scrawling 'Folly' against our wisest speeches, and stamping 'So be it' under the carelessly spoken jest.

She was busy while the young lovers kissed for the first time, by the mantelpiece; but no inward warning voice had told Angela that she herself was sealing the order of her life irrevocably when she gave Giovanni the best advice she could, and he accepted it to please her, making his instinct obey his judgment for her sake. A man is foolish who takes an important step without consulting the woman who loves him most dearly, be she mother, sister, wife, or sweetheart; but he is rarely wise if he follows her advice, like a rule, to the letter, for no woman goes from thought to accomplishment by the same road as a man. You cannot make a pointer of a setter, nor teach a bulldog to retrieve.

If Giovanni had sent in his resignation that evening, or even during the next day, as he was ready to do, it would have been accepted in the ordinary course of things; he would then, without doubt, have found employment for his talents and energy, either at home or abroad. He would in all probability have succeeded in life, because he possessed the elements of success; he would have married Angela in due time, and the two would probably have lived happily for many years, because they were suited to each other in all ways and were possessed of excellent constitutions. If all this had happened, their story would have little interest except for themselves, or as an example to young couples; and it is a deplorable fact that there is hardly anything so dull and tiresome in the world as a good example. The hoardings along life's dusty roads are plentifully plastered with good examples, in every stage of preservation, from those just fresh from the moral bill-poster's roll, redolent of paste, to the good old ones that are peeling off in tatters, as if in sheer despair because nobody has ever stopped to look at them. May the gods of literature keep all good story-tellers from concocting advertisements of the patent virtues!

The most important and decisive moment in Angela's life, from its beginning to its end, had passed so quietly that she never suspected its presence, and almost the very next instant brought her the first kiss of the only man she had ever loved, or was to love thereafter. _

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Read previous: Chapter 3

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