HIS ITALIAN WIFE.
THAT deep shadow of gloom which had fallen upon Christian Harefield’s life seemed to have descended also upon the house he lived in. The house—with its low ceilings, narrow corridors, strange ins and outs, odd corners, and black oak panelling—had doubtless been more or less gloomy of aspect for the last two hundred years. But an old world gloom like this contrasts pleasantly with the movement and bustle of glad domestic life—the flashes of sudden colour—the glow of many hearths—winter’s yule log and summer’s wealth of flowers—the fresh shrill voices of young children—the hospitalities of eventide, the passing in and out of many figures, varied yet recurrent as the combinations of a kaleidoscope.
For the last fifty years the Water House had been known to all Little Yafford, and within a radius of twenty miles, as a grave and sober mansion, where high jinks of any kind were as little to be expected as a reappearance of white-robed, oak-crowned Druids in that stony circle on the moor which had once reeked with the blood of human victims.
Old Christian Harefield, the father of the present owner of the estate, had been distinguished for various eccentricities, the chief of which was love of money. He did not love it too well to spend it on himself, but he loved it too well to waste it upon his fellow-creatures, whom he did not love. He was a born man-hater. No youthful disappointments, no wrong-doing of a familiar friend, no inconstancy of a woman, had soured his temper, or changed the current of his life. In his nursery he had regarded outside humanity with a cold distrust, and had been selfish in the transactions of his babyhood. At Eton he was known as the most respectable of lads, and was universally detested. There was a legend of his having given a boy he disliked the scarlatina, deliberately and of malice aforethought; and this was the only thing he had ever been known to give away. At the University he took care of himself, made his rooms the prettiest in his quad, rode good horses, read diligently and took his degree with ease, but he refused all invitations to wine parties, rather than incur the expense of returning hospitality, and he was remembered among his contemporaries as Stingy Harefield. When the time came for him to marry he made no attempt to escape that ordeal, as it presented itself to him in the form of an alliance with a certain Jane Pynsent, a young lady whose personal attractions were not startling, but whose father had enriched himself by commerce, and had recently acquired a large tract of land in Lincolnshire. The young lady and the tract of land went in one lot, and Christian married her, without feeling himself guilty of that kind of sentimental folly called ‘falling in love;’ a weakness which offended his reason in those inferior animals whom stern necessity obliged him to acknowledge as his fellow-creatures. From this alliance of the mercantile classes and the landed gentry sprang an only child, Christian the second. In his boyhood and youth he gave indications of a nobler and wider nature than his father’s. He was careless of money—had his attachments among his schoolfellows and companions at the University—gave wine parties on a larger scale than any undergraduate of his year—read hard—rode hard—was at once dissipated and a student—came through his examinations with flying colours, and left behind him a reputation which caused at least half a dozen freshmen to ruin themselves in the endeavour to imitate ‘Alcibiades Harefield,’ that being the name which Christian the second had won for himself.
There were hard words between father and son when the young man went back to the Water House with a B.A. degree, and a sheaf of bills on a more tremendous scale than usual. His mother’s estate had been settled upon Christian the younger, and beyond those paternal reproaches, he suffered very little from his extravagance. His majority, which had been wisely, or unwisely, deferred to his twenty-fifth birthday, would make him independent. He stayed a month or so at the Water House—shot on the moors—read late of nights in the sombre library—dined out very often, and saw as little of his father as was consistent with occupation of the same house. After this brief experience of domestic life he went off to the Continent, and remained there roaming from city to city, for the next ten years of his life, his father living on quietly at the Water House all the time, eating and sleeping and riding his steady cob, and generally taking care of himself in an eminently respectable and gentleman-like manner. In the tenth year of his son’s absence the father died suddenly of apoplexy—a catastrophe which seemed to most people in Little Yafford the natural close of a selfish, self-indulgent life. Christian appeared at the Water House in time for the funeral, after travelling day and night for a week. He saw his father buried, he examined his father’s papers in Mr. Scratchell’s presence, and he perused his father’s will drawn by Scratchell, and leaving everything to ‘my only son, Christian Harefield.’ The will had been made directly after Mrs. Harefield’s death, when Christian the younger was still at Eton; and although the father and son had not got on particularly well together afterwards, Christian the elder had not troubled himself to alter his bequest. He was too essentially selfish to leave a shilling away from his own flesh and blood. Christian had not treated him well, but Christian was in some wise a part of himself; and although he did not care much for Christian, there was nobody else for whom he cared at all.
Christian Harefield, now lord of the double estates, went back to the Continent, where he was heard of no more for the next five years, at the end of which time there came a report of his marriage with a very handsome Italian girl; but as everybody in Little Yafford remarked, ‘there had been no advertisement in the Times, which made the whole thing seem rather odd and irregular.’ A year or two later Mr. Harefield was heard of as living near Florence with the lovely Italian wife and a baby, and nine years after his father’s death he came suddenly home to the Water House, bringing the lovely wife, and a little girl of three years old, home with him. He was now a man of middle age, very grave of aspect, but courteous and not inaccessible. Aged people at Little Yafford began to speculate upon a change at the Water House. It would be as it had been when the late Christian Harefield was a child, and old Mr. and Mrs. Harefield gave hunting breakfasts and dinners, and the old place was kept up altogether as it ought to be—with a great deal of company in the dining-room, and plenty of waste and riot in the kitchen and servants’ hall.
Christian Harefield did not quite realize those hopes which memory had evoked in the hearts of the oldest inhabitants of Little Yafford; but he was not unsocial. The Water House resumed something of its ancient splendour: there was a large household liberally conducted—a fine stud of horses filled the roomy old stables. Mr. Harefield received his neighbours cordially, and gave dinners enough to satisfy the most exacting among his friends.
There had been a great many stories, for the most part purely the work of invention; or of that gradual cohesion of casual particles floating in space, which is the root of all scandal. Some people had heard, as a certain fact, that the beautiful Italian had been a flower girl, and that Mr. Harefield had seen her selling violets in the streets of Florence. Others were equally certain that she had been an opera singer. Others were assured that ballet-dancing had been her profession at the time she attracted her wealthy lover’s attention. The more scandalous hinted darkly that she was somebody else’s runaway wife, and that Christian Harefield’s marriage was no marriage at all.
But after Mr. and Mrs. Harefield had been living at the Water House three months, the slightest allusion to one of these once favourite scandals would have been about as great a solecism as any one in Little Yafford could be guilty of. The ancient slanders were sunk in the Red Sea of oblivion. Those who had been most active in disseminating these rumours forgot all about them—could not have taxed their memory with the slightest detail, would have looked quite puzzled if any underbred intruder in polite society had questioned them on the subject, or recalled former assertions. There was a dignity about Christian Harefield, a subdued elegance about his lovely wife, which made such stories as Little Yafford had formerly believed in obviously and distinctly impossible. He marry a ballet-girl dancer, the proudest of men! She sell penny bunches of violets, the most aristocratic of women! All the best people of Little Yafford visited the Water House, and swore by Mrs. Harefield.
She was not a woman to make her influence widely felt even in that quiet circle. Beauty and elegance were her chief gifts. She was passionately fond of music—played exquisitely, in a style which was poetic rather than brilliant—sang sweetly—but not with the power of voice or splendour of execution which would have justified the story of her having been a prima donna. She had graceful manners, and distinction of bearing; but the leading spirits in Little Yafford—Mrs. Dulcimer, Lady Jane Gowry, and an old Mrs. Dunraven—decided that she had not much mind.
‘She can only look lovely, my dear, and curtsey in that foreign way of hers, which reminds me of my young days, when ladies behaved like ladies, and good manners had not begun to get obsolete,’ said Lady Jane to her dear Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘She can only look elegant, and sit at her piano, and suffer us to admire her, just as we should if she were the Venus de Milo in the Louvre. I don’t think she has much more feeling or passion than that one-armed statue; but she is quite as lovely, and I suppose that is enough for Mr. Harefield.’
Everybody agreed that Christian Harefield was devoted to his wife, and that it was a happy marriage. But for his little girl he had evidently no very warm regard. As time went on, and no second baby appeared, the father began to feel himself personally injured by the sex of his only child. She ought to have been a son. Here was the great Harefield property in danger of travelling out of the direct line, and belonging to some spurious Harefield, who should only assume that good old name by Royal Letters Patent. And it seemed to Christian—large-minded and cosmopolitan as he considered himself—that it would be a loss to English society if real Harefields should become extinct in the land. This idea that his daughter was a mistake grew upon him, and by slow degrees began to go hand in hand with another idea—of a far more injurious and dangerous nature—and that was the fancy that his wife loved the child better than she loved him. Those tender maternal caresses which the gentle Italian lavished on her little girl galled her husband almost as much as if he had seen them given to a rival. This was the first arising of that sombre passion which was afterwards to turn all his life to poison. He first learnt the meaning of jealousy when he sat by his own fireside watching the lovely face opposite him smiling down upon Beatrix. He had never cared for children in the abstract, never had perceived any special poetry or beauty in young lives and small round rosy faces, and he could see nothing to love or admire in Beatrix, who, at this stage of her existence, was small and sallow, ‘a little yellow thing, all eyes and mouth,’ as he himself described her. It was a constant irritation to him to see such blind unreasoning affection squandered upon so unlovely an object.
He spent one winter and a spring at the Water House, and then carried his wife away with him to Baden, and from Baden went to Florence for the winter, leaving Beatrix in charge of a conscientious and elderly governess at Little Yafford. The child was almost heart-broken at the loss of that loving mother, but no one except Miss Scales, the governess, knew anything about it, and Miss Scales wrote Mrs. Harefield cheery letters, telling her that dear little Trix was getting tall and strong, and had just gone into words of two syllables.
Mr. and Mrs. Harefield came back to the Water House, and spent the summer and autumn at home, and gave parties and made themselves generally agreeable. Then came winter and a migration to the South, Beatrix staying behind with Miss Scales as before. This winter she went into words of three syllables, and made small excursions into various foreign grammars, taking to Italian naturally, as a duck hatched by a hen takes to the water.
This kind of life went on till Beatrix was ten, Mr. and Mrs. Harefield’s sojourn at the Water House growing briefer each year, and by degrees there arose a feeling in Little Yafford that Mr. and Mrs. Harefield were not quite the happiest couple in the world, that there were more clouds than sunshine in that small home circle. These things make themselves known somehow. It was hinted that there were quarrels. Mrs. Harefield had a distressed look sometimes. Beatrix was rarely found in the drawing-room with her mother when people called. Good-natured Mrs. Dulcimer discovered that the little girl was always cooped up in the schoolroom, or sent out for dreary walks with her governess, and felt herself called upon to interfere and draw Mrs. Harefield’s attention to this neglect of maternal duty; but Mrs. Harefield, mildly graceful as she was at all times, received the remonstrance with a placid dignity which rebuked the good-natured busybody.
There was trouble of some kind evidently at the Water House, but no one in Little Yafford could ever get face to face with the skeleton. Italian friends of Mrs. Harefield’s appeared upon the scene, but Little Yafford was not invited to meet these foreigners. Then came autumn, and another migration to warmer lands, and this time Miss Scales and Beatrix went with the travellers.
‘That is more as it should be,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, triumphantly. ‘So you see, after all, Clement, my remonstrance had some effect.’
‘If ever I find that any act of interference with other people’s conduct of their own affairs has a good effect, I will reverse the whole theory of morals which I have made for myself in relation to my neighbour,’ answered Mr. Dulcimer, with unaccustomed energy.
This last journey was fatal. Six weeks after the travellers left the Water House, Little Yafford was startled by the tidings of Mrs. Harefield’s death. She had died suddenly, at a little roadside inn in the Apennines, the loneliest spot of earth she could well have found for life’s closing scene. She had gone there alone with her husband on their way from Venice to Rome, leaving Beatrix and her governess at Venice. Mr. Harefield was distracted, and had gone off to wander no one knew where, after sending his child and the governess home to the Water House. Little Beatrix appeared there by and by, a silent and almost ghost-like child, whose small face looked unnaturally white above the dense blackness of her frock.
‘It’s absolutely heart-rending to see a Christian gentleman’s child look so like one’s idea of a vampire,’ exclaimed compassionate Mrs. Dulcimer, and she tried to lure the little girl to the Vicarage with a view to petting and making her happy; but Miss Scales guarded her pupil as jealously as if she had been a griffin in a fairy tale keeping watch and ward over an enchanted princess.
It was the universal opinion in Little Yafford—a kind of foregone conclusion—that Mr. Harefield would wander for years, and return to the Water House after a decade or two, with long gray hair and a bent backbone, and the general appearance of a pilgrim. He disappointed everybody’s expectations by coming back early in the spring and taking up his abode permanently in the grave old house, which now put on that mantle of silence and gloom which had never been lifted from it since.
Under this shadow of gloom, encircled by this perpetual silence and monotony, Beatrix had grown from childhood to womanhood. You could hear the dropping of the light wood ashes in a distant room as you stood in the hall at the Water House, or the chirping of a winter robin in the garden outside the windows, or the ticking of the dining-room clock, but of human voice or motion there was hardly anything to be heard. The kitchens and offices were remote, and the servants knew the value of good wages and a comfortable home too well to let any token of their existence reach Mr. Harefield’s ears. The master of that silent house sat in his library at the end of the low corridor, and read, or smoked, or mused, or wrote in solitude. Sometimes he took his daily ride or walk in all weathers, for months at a stretch; at other times he would remain for several weeks without leaving the house. He received no guests—he visited no one, having taken the trouble, immediately after his return, to let people know that he had come to the Water House in search of solitude, and not sympathy.
Scratchell, his lawyer and agent, and Mr. Namby, the family doctor, were the only two men freely admitted to his presence, and of these he saw as little as possible. He allowed Bella Scratchell to be with his daughter as much as Beatrix pleased to have her, but, save on Sundays, he never sat at meals with them or honoured them with his society. His hours were different from theirs, and they had Miss Scales to take care of them. What could they want more?
One day, when Beatrix was between sixteen and seventeen, Mrs. Dulcimer met the misanthrope in one of his solitary walks on the Druids’ moor, and ventured, not without inward fear and trembling, to attack him on the subject of his daughter’s solitary life.
‘It must be very dull for Beatrix at the Water House,’ she said.
‘I dare say it is, madam,’ answered Christian Harefield, with austere civility, ‘but I don’t mind that. Dulness is good for young women, in my opinion.’
‘Oh, but, dear Mr. Harefield,’ cried the Vicar’s wife, emboldened by his politeness, ‘there you differ from all the rest of the world.’
‘I have not generally found the rest of the world so wise, my dear madam, as to distress myself because its opinions and mine happen to be at variance,’ Mr. Harefield answered coldly.
Mrs. Dulcimer felt herself baffled. This stony urbanity was too much for her. But she remembered Beatrix’s pale joyless face as she had seen it in the chancel pew last Sunday, and made one more heroic effort.
‘Mr. Harefield, I am not going to ask you to change your own habits——’
‘That would be wasted labour, madam——’
‘Or to ask people to the Water House——’
‘I would not do my friends so great a wrong——’
‘But you might at least let Beatrix come to me. We are very quiet people at the Vicarage,—Clement is absorbed in his books—I in my workbasket. There would be no gaiety for her, but there would be the change from one house to another, and we lie higher. You must be damp at the Water House. I know Beatrix has suffered from neuralgia——’
‘A new fashion among young ladies, like the shape of their bonnets. I never heard of it when I was young——’
‘Oh, it was called toothache then, but it was just as excruciating. Then you really will let her come?’ pursued Mrs. Dulcimer, pretending to make sure of his consent.
‘Clement Dulcimer is a gentleman I greatly respect, and you are the most amiable of women. I cannot see why I should forbid my daughter coming to you if you like to be troubled with her. But I must make it a condition that you do not take her anywhere else—that she is to come to your house and yours alone.’
‘Most assuredly. I shall consider your wishes upon that point sacred,’ protested Mrs. Dulcimer, delighted with her success.
She called on Beatrix the next day, and carried her off to the Vicarage. The girl had been carefully educated by conscientious Miss Scales, and knew everything that a girl of her age is supposed to know, except the theory of music. She could have enlightened the Vicar about latitude and longitude, and the subjunctive mood in various languages. But she had all the deficiencies and peculiarities of a girl whose life had been lonely. She was proud and shy—what the Vicar called farouche—and it was a long time before her new friends could set her at ease. But when she did expand they grew very fond of her, and that new life at the Vicarage was like the beginning of her youth. She had never felt herself young before. Miss Scales’ prim perfection had been like a band of iron about her life. Her father’s gloom and hardness had weighed upon her like an actual burden. She had waked in the night sobbing, startled from some dim strange dream of an impossible happiness, by the recollection that she had a father who had never loved her, who never would love her.
This hardness of her father’s had gradually hardened her feelings towards him. She had left off hoping for any change in him, and with the cessation of hope came a stream of bitterness which overwhelmed every sweet and filial sentiment. As she grew from child to woman, her memories of the past took a new shape. Well-remembered scenes acted themselves over again before her mental vision under a new and more vivid light. She began to see that there had been unhappiness in her mother’s life, and that her father had been the cause of it, that the cloud had always come from him.
Brief episodes of that bygone life flashed back upon her with a cruel distinctness. She remembered herself leaning on her mother’s shoulder one evening as Mrs. Harefield sat at the drawing-room piano weaving the sweet tangle of Italian melody she loved so well. It was a summer twilight, and the windows were all open, the garden was full of roses, the river was shining under the setting sun.
She remembered her father’s coming in suddenly, and walking up to the piano. He took her by the wrist with a hard strong hand that hurt her a little.
‘Go to your governess,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to your mother.’
And then, before she could reach the door, she heard him say,—
‘So you have seen Antonio again.’
Those words haunted her curiously now that she was growing a woman. Who was Antonio? She could remember no one in the history of her life to whom that name belonged. It was an Italian name—the name of one of those Italian friends of her mother’s who came and went in those memory pictures, like figures in a dream. She could not distinguish one from the other. They had all pale dark faces, like ivory that had been long shut from the light, and dark gleaming eyes, and hair like the shining wings of the rooks in the tall old elm tops yonder. But she could not recall any one of them who had impressed her, a wondering child of seven, more than the rest.
Yes, there was one—the one who sang so beautifully. She could remember sitting on her mother’s lap one evening before dinner, the room dimly lighted, no one present but her mother and the Italian gentleman. She remembered his sitting at the piano and singing church music—music that thrilled her till, in a nervous ecstasy, she burst into tears, and her mother soothed her and carried her away, saying something to the strange gentleman in Italian as she went towards the door, and he got up from the piano and came to them and stopped on the threshold to bend down and kiss her, as she had never been kissed before in all her life. She could remember the kiss now, though it was ten years ago.
And he spoke to her mother in Italian, a few hurried words that seemed half sorrow and half anger.
Was that Antonio?
Her mother’s rooms had never been opened by any one but Christian Harefield since his return to the Water House after that last fatal journey. There was something ghostly in the idea of those three rooms facing the river, those three locked doors in the long oak gallery. Beatrix passed those sealed doors always with a thrill of pain. If her mother had but lived, how different life would have been for her! There would have been sorrow perhaps, for she knew there had been sorrow in the last year of her mother’s life, but they two would have shared it. They would have clung to each other closer, loved each other more fondly because of the husband and father’s unkindness.
‘What would papa matter to me if I had mamma?’ she thought. ‘He would be only a gloomy person coming in and out, like the dark brief night which comes in and out among the summer days. We should not have minded him. We should have accepted him as a part of nature, the shadow that made our sunshine brighter.’
Often and often she sat upon a bench on the river terrace, leaning back with her arms folded above her head, looking up at those seven blank windows, darkly shuttered, three windows for the spacious old bedroom, one for the narrow dressing closet, three for the pretty morning-room which she remembered dimly, a white panelled room, with pale blue curtains all worked with birds and flowers in many coloured silks, black and gold Japanese cabinets, a tall chimney-piece with a curious old looking-glass above it, let into the wall, pictures, and red and blue china jars, a faint odour of pot pourri, a piano, a frame for Berlin woolwork, with a group of unfinished roses that never seemed to grow any bigger.
‘Dear room,’ she said, ‘to think that I should live so near you, pass your door every day, and yet remember you so faintly, as if you were a dream!’
Once a curious fancy flashed upon her as she sat in the evening glow, looking up at those windows.
‘Perhaps Antonio’s picture is in that room.’
She could just recollect a miniature in a velvet case, which she had opened one day, the picture of a gentleman. She had only glanced at it, when her mother took the case from her and put it away. The complexion was more beautiful than Antonio’s, supposing the gentleman who sang the church music to have been Antonio; but people’s complexions in portraits are generally superior to the reality.
Kind as her friends at the Vicarage were, Beatrix never talked of these old memories. The past was a sealed book. Not for worlds could she have spoken of it—not even to Bella, with whom she conversed as freely, in a general way, as a little girl talks to her doll.
The new home life at the Vicarage brightened her wonderfully. Her reserve wore off as she grew accustomed to that friendly household. She was enraptured with Mr. Dulcimer’s library. Here, on the Vicar’s well-stocked shelves, she found those Italian poets her mother must have loved—prose writers too—quaint old romances, bound in white vellum, on curious ribbed paper, printed at Venice two hundred years ago. She spent many an hour sitting on a hassock in the sunny bow-window, with a pile of those old Italian books on the floor beside her, while the Vicar sat at his big table annotating Berkeley, or making excursions into the world of science.
Here she read the Bridgewater Treatises, and got her first grand idea of the universe. Here her young mind soared away from the narrow track along which Miss Scales had conducted it, and entered the regions of poetry and delight. And here—in this sunny old room, with its walls of hooks—young Love took her by the hand, and led her across the threshold of his wonder-world. Here she first met Cyril Culverhouse, and learnt how fair a thing piety may seem in a bright young soul, eager to do some good in its generation. Religion hitherto, as interpreted by Miss Scales, had appeared to her a hard and difficult business, which no one could take to except under severest pressure—a system of punishments and penances invented for the torment of mankind. But in Cyril’s teaching how different it all seemed! Religion became a sentiment to live or die for. Without it happiness or peace of mind seemed impossible.
‘Your mother belonged to the old faith, perhaps,’ he said, one day, when they were talking of High and Low Church.
Beatrix gave a faint shiver.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered, sadly. ‘Mamma never talked to me about religion. I was too young, perhaps.’
Cyril found her curiously ignorant of all that was most vital in religion, and his first interest in her arose from this very ignorance of hers. He was so glad to set her right—to get her out of the narrow Scales track, Miss Scales being essentially Low Church, and scenting Roman encroachment in an anthem or a surplice. The interest soon deepened, but he could hardly have told when it first grew into love. Perhaps that might never have come, if Beatrix’s fresh young soul had not gone out to meet his unawares, so that ere he knew himself a lover he found himself beloved.
The thought was full of rapture, for at this stage of their friendship she seemed to him the most perfect among women—the lovely embodiment of youth and innocence, and noble yearnings, truthfulness, purity, all things fair and holy. But the consideration that she was Christian Harefield’s heiress dashed his joy. He saw himself in advance—branded in the sight of men—as the clerical adventurer who, under the guise of religion, had pushed his own fortune.
Then it was—while it was still a new thing for them to talk of their mutual love—that he told Beatrix her father must be informed of their attachment.