“New Orleans, March —, 1856.“I never disappoint my bail. My thoughts on awful subjects roll, damnation and the dead, what horrors seize the guilty soul upon a dying bed. Lingering about these mortal shores she makes a long delay, till like a flood with rapid force, death sweeps the wretch away. Good for Doctor Watts. I have three weeks yet to spare.”
“New Orleans, March —, 1856.
“I never disappoint my bail. My thoughts on awful subjects roll, damnation and the dead, what horrors seize the guilty soul upon a dying bed. Lingering about these mortal shores she makes a long delay, till like a flood with rapid force, death sweeps the wretch away. Good for Doctor Watts. I have three weeks yet to spare.”
How it was signed I am not aware. The envelope was marked “paid $32.75.”
On the afternoon previous to the sitting of the court at which Malcolm was under bail to appear, he unexpectedly presented himself at Mr. Burchard’s office. The conflicting emotions in Mr. Burchard’s breast upon beholding him can well be imagined. Indignation for the imposition and forgery was most apparent. Vengeance was secondary,tempered by the fact that he had made his appearance, although not yet safe in jail. His soul burst forth in a holy horror of a man apparently incapable of entertaining a moral sentiment, and so brazen as not to appreciate his guilt. His presence so exasperated Mr. Burchard that he rushed toward the door without any definite intention but to be rid of his visitor. Malcolm calmly placed his back against the closed door and said very coolly: “All this indignation is well enough before a jury, Mr. Burchard, and I read in your countenance what is passing in your mind, but it is wise to take men as they are and the world as it is, and not as it should be. I meet you to-day on equal terms. You claim something of me, and I of you. If you are a man of honor, fulfil your contract. If you are a sneak, do as I should have done had I forfeited my bail. I have shown the estimate I put upon my duty by appearing to discharge you as my bail in the face of the indignity I have put upon you, and knowing full well what I was to encounter. Show half my pluck and it will serve you well. I am not yet your prisoner, and by the Eternal! I will not be till to-morrow, when I shall be content with that position. On your peril answer me. Will you fulfil your agreement? Will you be a man or a knave?”
Mr. Burchard answered not, but saw the desperate nature of the man with whom he had to deal, and that he was provided with weapons with which to enforce his argument. Malcolm proceeded,“I never was and never will be a sneak. I am bound by honor as well as you. You are a lawyer, and a good one. I am a burglar, sir, and am not ashamed of my jobs. You exalt your profession, and so do I mine. Business is business, and mine is as honorable as yours. Think you I am less public-spirited than you? Think you I love my wife and children less than you? Come, come, Mr. Burchard; down from your perch! You are a man of principle. I am no sardine. You have taken my money, and you cannot return it if you would, for the bankers upon whom it was drawn have failed, and the draft has not been presented and is your loss. I know what you would like to say. It is true I used dissimulation and procured an invitation to your dinner-party, and here is Winfield Burchard’s letter to you (presenting it), whose handwriting I imitated; but it was all in my line. I laid a bet I could do it, and that draft was just the sum I won. Bristol Bill pays up like gentle folks, but then he didn’t know my opportunities. What possessed you to dismiss Maguire? but no matter; that is all gone by. During the last eight years I have passed at least six hundred nights in your house, and have been very frequently in your sleeping-room, and have heard your confidential talk with your wife. Doubt it, do you? Yes, your doorwasalways bolted on the inside, and no other one opened into your chamber, but I can tell you conversations you had with your wife, which will convince you. Do you remember onenight when your wife became nervous and fell to crying lest the pain she felt in her breast should prove to be a cancer, and you told her that you would go to Boston with her and consult Dr. Jackson and ask Dr. P. to go with you? Do, eh? And do you remember one night when your niece slept upon the sofa in your room? I had no idea she was there, and needlessly waked her. She screamed, and while you was attending to her fright I slipped out and didn’t leave your door bolted. I heard you tell her she was dreaming.
“And do you remember one night telling your wife that you could not imagine how three cigars got out of a new box you had opened the night before? Those cigars were the only things that either Maguire or I ever took from your house.
“I will make you this proposition, and if you will accept it you will do well. By the night train my two accomplices in that job will arrive. I don’t intend to be shut up till they come. I will pay for six men to sit up with me here to-night in this office, and you shall select them, and in the morning I will pay their fees and go to jail.”
The proposition was accepted, and the chief of police furnished the keepers.
During that night Mr. Burchard’s office was the scene of strange revelations. Malcolm furnished money to one of the officers, who brought in a basket of champagne, and ordered a supper at one o’clock in the morning, to be the most complete that money could buy and the city furnish.The officers were at liberty to invite in their friends who were reliable. Malcolm distributed to each of his keepers five times the sum of money agreed upon for their wages, and demanded of them a faithful performance of their duty. Some thirty had entered the office, and the door was closed and not to be opened on any account till supper was announced. Malcolm had sent to a neighboring bookstore, and obtained one pack of every edition of playing cards there kept for sale. Some forty packs with different backs were piled up at one end of the table. Malcolm invited some one to take a hand of euchre with him. The captain, who was considered the most expert player, took a chair at the corner of the table, and the rest were to observe the game, but say nothing which they should discover till the game was over. Malcolm took one of the packs from the envelope and said, “This edition was gotten up by Count —— at ——, and with it he played twenty-one nights and won —— thousand dollars before the markings were discovered. Cut the cards if you please, and mind, if you can, that the ten of spades is not turned.” The cards were dealt and the ten of spades was turned. The two bowers and two aces were given to the captain, who ordered up the ten.
“Now, captain, I have given you the bowers and two aces, and yet you are euchred.” And so it was. Malcolm inquired if any one perceived how it was done, and, receiving a negative reply,said, “Very well, he shall do precisely the same thing, and see then if you detect the method. I will cut for a ten to be turned and order it up, and you will observe.”
Almost the same cards were put into Malcolm’s hand, as had been put into the captain’s.
“Now,” said Malcolm, “I order it up, and will make one,” and so it was.
“Did any of you see how that was done?”
None could detect. The cards were again shuffled by a looker-on. It was Malcolm’s deal.
“I must not make too often. This time you shall march. You see I have given you three trumps and a king and an ace of another suit.” And so it was.
The cards were shuffled again. “You must make one this time.” And so it was.
“Now,” said Malcolm, “please say whether I shall make one, or lose one, or go out.”
It was the captain’s deal, and the company requested Malcolm to go out if he could.
“Very well then, I cut a bower; the left is next above it as they fell into the last hand, and so will not be out.”
Malcolm ordered up a queen, took it out with a king, and made three low clubs and won the game.
“Let’s take another pack while these gimlet-eyed fellows hunt up the markings. This edition was gotten up by Sunderland for a high-low-jack pack, and was read the first night. The professionnever use it, the marks are so apparent. Try it once at all-fours.”
The cards were dealt by the captain, and Malcolm said, “I will stand, although I have but one trump, for you have none.” And Malcolm made three points.
“Had you detected the manipulation, I should have lost and you would have made three.
“Try another pack. This had a run of three months before it was detected. It is well executed, and only the most sagacious and quick-sighted are never mistaken in the cards. There is not an edition of cards that I cannot read as well by seeing one side as the other. No pack was ever edited in fairness to both parties. A man is a fool who will get out such an edition. I carried two new ones to the B—— house in London, and won thirteen nights with them.”
One of the company who had been out and returned, produced a pack with plain backs, and asked triumphantly if Mr. Malcolm would please to read them by the backs.
“This edition,” said Malcolm, “was gotten up in Edinburgh by an Irishman named Mulligan, and was popular for a while, but when he won every night with it suspicions were aroused, and finally a boy twelve years old deciphered it. I can tell each card across the room.” And he did.
And so the entertainment went on, Malcolm winning every game till supper was served; not one of the company detecting how it was done.
“Now, boys,” said Malcolm “this is my treat, and please enjoy yourselves, for I shall expect you all to be in court when my case is tried, to laugh on my side. Lawyers don’t understand the value of a chuckle in swaying a jury in a doubtful case. Lay to. ‘The art of cookery,’ says Henry Cornelius Agrippa, ‘is very useful if not dishonest.’ My appetite is good, and I trust you are all likewise minded, for Beaumont and Fletcher say, ‘What an excellent thing God did bestow upon man when he gave him a good appetite. Mine is almost equal to that of Erisichthon described by Ovid,—
‘Thus Erisichthon’s profane chops devourAll sorts of food: in him food is the causeOf hunger: and he will employ his jawsTo whet his appetite.’
‘Thus Erisichthon’s profane chops devourAll sorts of food: in him food is the causeOf hunger: and he will employ his jawsTo whet his appetite.’
“’Tis said that Maximus, the Emperor who succeeded Alexander Memneaus, consumed forty pounds of flesh in one day, and drank an amphora of wine containing forty-eight quarts.
“Waiter, pass your wines. No blue ruin or heavy wet. In the days of the great Cæsar all feasts began with eggs and ended with fruits, cream and apples; hence the proverb,ab avo usque ad mala, and the man who did not crush his eggshell or put his folded napkin on his left knee, was considered a fool. As we have not eggs we will do our best with the napkins. No melancholy subjects at this table. So here’s luck.” And all drank a bumper.
“Did you ever hear how Pope Julius III. became enraged against his cook for not having saved him a cold peacock for supper, and how he began to blaspheme? Whereupon one of his cardinals said to him, ‘Let not your Holiness be so moved with a matter of so little weight.’ ‘What!’ said the pope, ‘if God was so angry for one apple that he cast our first parents out of Paradise, why may not I, his vicar, be angry for a peacock, sithers a peacock is greater than an apple?’
“The oysters from Tarentum, so prized by one of the Cæsars, I forget which, were not to be compared to these. Captain, take a hand at them. Let me give you a song.”
And with a sweet melodious voice and a Scotch accent, he sang Burns’s Ode on the Haggis.
“‘Fair, fa’ your honest, sonsie face,Great chieftain o’ the pudding race:Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,Paunch, tripe, or thairm;Weel are ye worthy o’ a graceAs lang’s my arm.’
“‘Fair, fa’ your honest, sonsie face,Great chieftain o’ the pudding race:Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,Paunch, tripe, or thairm;Weel are ye worthy o’ a graceAs lang’s my arm.’
“This bird is excellent; whoever cooked it,
‘His name should be enrolledIn Estcourt’s book, whose gridiron’s framed of gold.’
‘His name should be enrolledIn Estcourt’s book, whose gridiron’s framed of gold.’
“Help yourselves, gentlemen, digestion is the business of the stomach, and indigestion that of the physicians. It is better to dine late, for one can then concentrate all his thoughts upon his plate, forget business, and only think of eating anddrinking and going to bed. Ha, ha! I should have omitted the bed in quoting from the gourmands, for they would rather fast than be obliged to eat a good dinner in a hurry. Five hours is little enough, provided Mr. Burchard shall not in the mean time appear and drive us away.
“This venison is delicious; none was ever better served. The Roman Senators debated the question how a turbot should be cooked, and the author of this dish deserves a place among such.
“Montmaur is reported to have said that Easter and Christmas were the two best days in the year. Easter because it was farthest from Lent, and Christmas because then you breakfasted at midnight. Who says this is not equal to Montmaur’s Christmas breakfast?”
This sort of banter, interspersed with songs and stories, was kept up till a late hour, when all of a sudden the keepers awoke to the fact that Malcolm had flown. The visitors laughed heartily. The company dispersed, not standing upon the order of their going. The table was cleared, and the office put in order. Only one of the keepers remained, who resembled in appearance a cat that had played with her mouse and lost it; the others were out looking for Malcolm. At an early hour in the morning he returned, and seating himself at Mr. Burchard’s desk, wrote him this note:
Mr. Burchard,—I trust I did not disturb your repose. I found, this morning, in your safe inyour house this pretty little casket sent you from your English namesake. I have seen it often before, but wanted another squint at it, and I have brought it to your office lest some burglar might steal it from your house. I noticed your wife’s watch lying around loose in your sleeping-room, which is of no great value—to me,—and I contented myself with the charms, which I will put into your steel chest, here in the office, for safe keeping against the time of my need. The putting a yoke on the keys of your door, so I could not turn them with the nippers, was all useless. The chair poised against your sleeping-room door gave me a deal of trouble, and I could not put it back as I found it. Please excuse me. The thread on the stairs attached to an alarm-bell might as well have been omitted. The old-fashioned fork against the bolt I put back as I found it, and came out by the dining-room window. Your portfolio you will find between the beds on which you were sleeping. It took me half an hour to make you turn over so I could do it. George Waters is my counsel, to whom I have committed my case. He will arrange the evidence. Unless you eat your own words, you will sit beside him and ask the jury if they believe the case is made out beyond a reasonable doubt, for I know better than you the weight of your character. I shall be in jail by breakfast-time.Malcolm.
Mr. Burchard,—
I trust I did not disturb your repose. I found, this morning, in your safe inyour house this pretty little casket sent you from your English namesake. I have seen it often before, but wanted another squint at it, and I have brought it to your office lest some burglar might steal it from your house. I noticed your wife’s watch lying around loose in your sleeping-room, which is of no great value—to me,—and I contented myself with the charms, which I will put into your steel chest, here in the office, for safe keeping against the time of my need. The putting a yoke on the keys of your door, so I could not turn them with the nippers, was all useless. The chair poised against your sleeping-room door gave me a deal of trouble, and I could not put it back as I found it. Please excuse me. The thread on the stairs attached to an alarm-bell might as well have been omitted. The old-fashioned fork against the bolt I put back as I found it, and came out by the dining-room window. Your portfolio you will find between the beds on which you were sleeping. It took me half an hour to make you turn over so I could do it. George Waters is my counsel, to whom I have committed my case. He will arrange the evidence. Unless you eat your own words, you will sit beside him and ask the jury if they believe the case is made out beyond a reasonable doubt, for I know better than you the weight of your character. I shall be in jail by breakfast-time.
Malcolm.
At the bottom of the note was a well-drawnhand with spread fingers at the end of a man’s nose.
When all the officers had returned, dropping in one by one, towards morning, they were somewhat surprised and relieved upon beholding Malcolm. He informed them that it would be all right if they would all appear at his trial and laugh for him.
At the trial, Mr. Burchard, care-worn and nervous, made his appearance. Mr. Waters conducted the testimony for the defence. Mr. Burchard inquired of him what testimony Malcolm relied upon, and was answered that no testimony whatever was to be introduced, but he would rely altogether upon the lack of testimony on the part of the government. A cold shiver ran down Burchard’s backbone. The question of guilty or not guilty turned upon the identity of the mat previously spoken of, which, it was asserted, Malcolm threw away as he ran. The watchman testified positively to the fact, but it was in the night, and he might have been mistaken. Mr. W. H. B. testified generally as to the robbery, and recognized the mat as probably the one made by his daughter, although he could not positively make oath to the fact. As the case turned upon the testimony of Miss B., I give the whole of the cross-examination.
Question by Mr. Waters.You have said that youknowthis mat to have been the work of your own hands, and that you made it for a particular purpose. If you please, what was that purpose?Answer.I had presented me on Christmas a finestatuette of Samuel, which I admired so much that I worked this mat with great care upon which to place it.Q.And did you work it from a pattern?A.Yes, sir.Q.And have you ever seen others like it?A.Yes, sir, three, but not in this city.Q.And where did you get the pattern?A.From a friend in Philadelphia.Q.Now, if you have seen other mats like this, how do you know, of your own knowledge, that this is not some other lady’s work?A.I know it is my work because the centre portion of the mat was left plain, which centre is exactly the size of the base of my statuette.Q.Is there any other reason which you can give?A.I know it looks like my mat.Q.Certainly, but would it not look like your mat if it had been wrought by another lady?A.Perhaps so.Q.You sayperhapsso; would it not certainly so look?A.I think it would.Q.Have you the statuette now?A.Yes, sir, it is at our house.
Question by Mr. Waters.You have said that youknowthis mat to have been the work of your own hands, and that you made it for a particular purpose. If you please, what was that purpose?
Answer.I had presented me on Christmas a finestatuette of Samuel, which I admired so much that I worked this mat with great care upon which to place it.
Q.And did you work it from a pattern?
A.Yes, sir.
Q.And have you ever seen others like it?
A.Yes, sir, three, but not in this city.
Q.And where did you get the pattern?
A.From a friend in Philadelphia.
Q.Now, if you have seen other mats like this, how do you know, of your own knowledge, that this is not some other lady’s work?
A.I know it is my work because the centre portion of the mat was left plain, which centre is exactly the size of the base of my statuette.
Q.Is there any other reason which you can give?
A.I know it looks like my mat.
Q.Certainly, but would it not look like your mat if it had been wrought by another lady?
A.Perhaps so.
Q.You sayperhapsso; would it not certainly so look?
A.I think it would.
Q.Have you the statuette now?
A.Yes, sir, it is at our house.
At this point of the trial the statuette was sent for and brought into court by the father of the witness. Mr. Waters took it into his possession. Considerable discussion arose when the prosecuting attorney insisted upon being allowed to examine it. Mr. Waters became almost violent, and declaredhe would smash the image rather than be so imposed upon. He was cross-examining the witness with no testimony for the accused, and he insisted upon his rights without interruption. The court ruled in Mr. Waters’s favor. He, holding the statuette by the base, walked up to Miss B., and inquired of her if she recognized it as her own.
A.I certainly do.Q.And how do you know it is certainly your own?A.It is just like mine.Q.But are there not other copies so like it as that you cannot tell the difference, nor one from the others?A.Yes.Q.How then can you say for a certainty that this is yours?A.Because my father has just brought it from our house, and I saw him go for it and return with it. I can give no better reason.Q.Can you say of your own knowledge, from an examination of the image, that it is yours?A.No, sir.Q.Have you any more reliable knowledge concerning the mat being yours?A.Yes, for the space in the middle was made expressly to fit the base of the statuette.Q.And are you willing to risk your testimony upon that fact alone?A.I am.
A.I certainly do.
Q.And how do you know it is certainly your own?
A.It is just like mine.
Q.But are there not other copies so like it as that you cannot tell the difference, nor one from the others?
A.Yes.
Q.How then can you say for a certainty that this is yours?
A.Because my father has just brought it from our house, and I saw him go for it and return with it. I can give no better reason.
Q.Can you say of your own knowledge, from an examination of the image, that it is yours?
A.No, sir.
Q.Have you any more reliable knowledge concerning the mat being yours?
A.Yes, for the space in the middle was made expressly to fit the base of the statuette.
Q.And are you willing to risk your testimony upon that fact alone?
A.I am.
The mat and the statuette were then shown thewitness and the jury, and the base of the statuette overlapped the plain surface in the centre of the mat half an inch. The witness became faint, and was carried into the lobby. The jury, without leaving their seats, rendered a verdict ofNOT GUILTY.
The captain feasted Malcolm that night, and obtained from him the secret of his defence. Maguire, as a woman, had procured the situation of cook in the house of Mr. W. H. B., and had substituted for the original Samuel another, altogether similar, except that its base was half an inch larger.
The captain further inquired what had been Malcolm’s occupation in early life, and how he had acquired so much knowledge of the gourmands and feasts.
“I was cook at Baden Baden,” said Malcolm, “at the B—— House. There I met Count S., who took a fancy to me. I served also at the tables, after that as waiter in the house, and keeping an eye open I was a great help to the Count. He knew everything about the table, kitchen, and the larder, and I remembered what he used to repeat night after night, when a year or two ago I found Dick Humelbergius’s book upon the art of never breakfasting at home and always dining abroad. I found everything recorded there, and that is pretty much the only book I ever read. I can quote Latin, and know where to put it in, but what the —— the meaning of it is, I have no notion.”
“Allow me further to inquire by what process or contrivance you can slide a bolt on the opposite side of the door?”
“I paid $3500 for that information, and don’t propose to part with it.”
“Then advise me what is best for me to do when I find a burglar in my sleeping-room in the night time?”
“Do nothing, sir, unless you are hunting up a graveyard. We never desire to maim or kill, but we can. I should be poorly provided or skilled if I was not ready for such emergencies. As soon as the burglar leaves your room, rise and light the gas, and he will trouble you no more.”
“One other question. Did you rob and then burn the Jenks house?”
“That is not a question to be answered, but I will say that I have a drawing of the house and the location of every piece of furniture in it, which is perfect.”
To this day, only two of the persons who were present at the dinner-party are aware of the history of the two worthies, the Reverend Mr. Malcolm of Oxford and Maguire the butler of Mr. Bernon Burchard.
By Harriet Prescott Spofford.
⁂Harper’s Magazine, June, 1883.
Neverdid anything seem fresher and sweeter than the plateau on which we emerged in the early sunset, after defiling all day through the dark deep mountain-sides in the rain.
We had promised Rhoda to assault her winter fastness whenever she should summon us; and now, in obedience to her message, a gay party of us had left the railway, and had driven, sometimes in slushy snow and sometimes on bare ground, up the old mountain-road, laughing and singing and jangling our bells, till at length the great bare woods, lifting their line forever before us and above us, gave place to bald black mountain-sides, whose oppressive gloom and silence stifled everything but a longing to escape from between them, and from the possible dangers in crossing bridges, and fording streams swollen by the fortnight’s thaws andrains. Now and then the stillness resolved itself into the murmuring of bare sprays, the rustling of rain, the dancing of innumerable unfettered brooks glittering with motion, but without light, from the dusky depths; now and then a ghastly lustre shot from the ice still hanging like a glacier upon some upper steep, or a strange gleam from the sodden snow on their floors lightened the roofs of the leafless forests that overlapped the chasms, and trailed their twisted roots like shapes of living horror. What was there, I wondered, so darkly familiar in it all? in what nightmare had I dreamed it all before? Long ere the journey’s end our spirits became dead as last night’s wine; we shared the depression of all nature, and felt as if we had come out of chaos and the end of all things when the huge mountain gates closed behind us, and we dashed out on the plateau where the grass, from which the wintry wrapping had been washed, had not lost all its greenness, and in the sudden lifting of the rain-cloud a red sparkle of sunset lighted the windows, as if a hundred flambeaux had been kindled to greet us.
A huge fire burned in the fireplace of the drawing-room when we had mounted the stairs and crossed the great hall, where other fires were blazing and sending ruddy flames to skim among the cedar rafters; and all that part of the house sacred to Colonel Vorse, and opened now the first time in many winters, was thoroughly warm and cheerful with lights and flowers and rugs and easy-chairsand books. We might easily have fancied ourselves, that night, in those spacious rooms, when, toilets made and dinner over, we re-assembled around the solid glow of the chimney logs, a modern party in some old mediæval chamber, all the more for the spirit of the scene outside, where the storm was telling its rede again, rain changing to snow, and a cruel blast keening round the many gables and screaming down the chimneys. After all, Rhoda’s and Merivale’s plan of having us in the hills before late-lingering winter should be quite gone, and doing a little Sintram business with skates and wolves and hill visions, should have been carried out earlier. To them it was all but little less novel than it was to me, and Rhoda, who, although a year or two my junior, had been my intimate, so far as I ever had an intimate, would not rest till she had devised this party, without which she knew she could not have me, even persuading our good old Dr. Devens to leave his pulpit and people, and stamp the proceeding with his immaculate respectability. As it was, however, it looked as though we were simply to be shut in by a week of storm following the thaw. Well, there are compensations in all things: perhaps two people in whom I had some interest would know each other a trifle better before the week ended then.
The place was really the home of Rhoda and Merivale, or was now to become so. Colonel Vorse, their father, who had married so young that he felt but little older than they, and was quitetheir companion, was still the owner of the vast summer hostelry, although no longer its manager. After accumulating his fortune he had taken his children about the world, educating them and himself at the same time, with now an object lesson in Germany and now another in Peru, and finally returning to this place, which, so far as we could see, was absolute desolation, without a neighbor, but which to him was bristling with memories and associations and old friends across the intervale and over the mountain and round the spur. There was something weird to me, as I looked out at the flying whiteness of the moonlit storm, in those acquaintances of his among the hollows of these pallid hills; it seemed as though they must partake of the coldness and whiteness, and as if they were only dead people, when all was said. Perhaps Dr. Devens, who half the way up had been quoting,
“Pavilioned high, he sitsIn darkness from excessive splendor born,”
“Pavilioned high, he sitsIn darkness from excessive splendor born,”
had another phase of the same feeling. I heard him saying, as I passed him five minutes before, where he sat astride a chair in front of the long oriel casement: “There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye hath not seen: the lion’s whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. He putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth the mountains by the roots. He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and his eye seeth every precious thing. He bindeththe floods from overflowing; and the thing that is hid bringeth he forth to light.” He is expecting a convulsion of nature, I remember thinking, as I went by and paused at another window myself. A convulsion of nature! I fancy that he found it.
“There is something eerie here,” I said, as I still gazed at the scene; for the dim gigantic shapes of the hills rose round us like sheeted ghosts, while the flying scud of the storm, filled with the white diffusion of unseen light, every now and then opened to let the glimpses out. “And see the witch-fires,” as the rosy reflections of our burning logs and lights danced on the whirling snow without. “Is there anything wanting to make us feel as if we had been caught here by some spell, and were to be held by some charm?”
“I wish I knew the charm,” said Colonel Vorse, by my side, and half under his breath. And then I felt a little angrier with myself for coming than I had felt before.
“I often hear you talking of your belief in certain telluric forces that must have most power among the mountains where they first had play, and where earth is not only beneath, but is above you and around you. Well, we are here in the stronghold of these telluric forces. I am their old friend and ally: let me see what they will do for me.”
It was true. And I half shivered with an indefinite fear that I might be compelled, in spite of all wish and prejudice, and birthright—I, the child of proud old colonial grandees of the South; he, theson of a mountain farmer, who had married a mate of his own degree, and had kept a mountain inn till fortune found him and death took her. My father at least was the child of those proud old colonials, and I had lived with his people and been reared on their traditions. Who my mother was I never knew; for my father had married her in some romantic fashion—a runaway match—and she had died at my birth, and he had shortly followed her. I had nothing that belonged to her but the half of a broken miniature my father had once painted of her, as I understood. I always wore it, with I know not what secret sentiment, but I showed it to nobody. I had sometimes wondered about the other half, but my life had not left me much time for sentiment or wonder—full of gayety till my grandfather’s death left me homeless; full of gayety since his friend Mrs. Montresor had adopted me for child and companion, subject to her kind whims and tyrannies. But if she took me here and took me there, and clad me like a princess, I was none the less aware of the fact that I was without a penny—morbidly aware of it without doubt. But it disposed me to look with favor on no rich man’s suit, and the lover as penniless as I and as fine as my ideal lover had not yet appeared. It made me almost hate the face and form, the color, the hair, that they dared to call Titianesque, speak of as if it were the free booty of pigment and canvas, and wish to drag captive in the golden chains of their wealth. When I had met Colonel Vorse, a yearago, twice my age though he was, he was the first one I had wished as poor as I—he the plebeian newly rich. Yet not so newly rich was he that he had not had time to become used to his riches, to see the kingdoms of the earth and weigh them in his balance, to serve his country on the battle-field, and his State in the council-chamber; and, for the rest, contact with the world is sadly educating.
“I often look at Colonel Vorse among the men born in the purple,” said Mrs. Montresor once—she thought people born in the purple were simply those who had never earned their living—“and he is the superior of them all. What a country it is where a man keeping a common tavern in the first half of his life may make himself the equal of sovereigns in the other half! I don’t understand it; he is the finest gentleman of them all. And he looks it. Don’t you think so, Helena?”
But I never told Mrs. Montresor what I thought. It is all very well to generalize and to be glad that certain institutions produce certain effects; but of course you are superior to the institutions, or you wouldn’t be generalizing so, and all the more, of course, superior to the effects, and so I don’t see how it signifies to you personally.
“You ought to have your head carried on a pike,” said Mrs. Montresor, again. “You will, if we ever have anybonnets rougesin America. You are the aristocrat pure and simple. The Princess Lamballe was nothing to you. You think humanity exists so thatnous autres, by standing on it, may getthe light and air. You are sure that you are made of different clay—the canaille of street mud, for instance, and you of the fine white stuff from which they mould Dresden china. You are quite a study to me, my love. I expect to see you marry a pavior yet, either one who lays down or one who tears up paving-stones.” But I had only laughed again. She plumed herself on being cosmopolitan even to her principles.
“You give me credit for too much thinking on the subject,” I said, “if it is credit. Indeed, I don’t concern myself about such people; and as for marrying one of them, I could as soon marry into a different race, African or Mongolian. They are a different race.”
And I remembered all this as Colonel Vorse stood leaning his hand above me on the jamb of the window-frame—for although I was tall, he was a son of Anak—with that air which, never vaunting strength, always made you aware of its repression. I could fancy hearing Mrs. Montresor say, “That air of his! it always fetches women!” for she loved a little slang, by some antipodal attraction of her refinement, and I instinctively stiffened myself, determined it should never fetchme. And here he was calling his allies, the spirits and powers of the dark and terrible mountain heights and depths, and openly giving battle. I don’t know why it depressed me; I felt as if the very fact that it did was a half surrender; I looked up at him a moment; I forgot who he was; I wished he was as poor as I.But to become the mother of Rhoda, my friend, and of Merivale, that laughing young giant—what absurdity, if all the rest were equal! And that other, the dead woman, the first wife—should one not always be jealous of that sweet early love? Could one endure it? Here among these hills with all their ghostliness she would haunt me. And then I turned and swept away to the fireside, holding out my hands to the flame, and glad to sink into the chair that some one had left empty there.
I hardly knew what world I was living in when, perhaps a half-hour later, I heard Colonel Vorse’s voice. “The trouble is that men arenotborn free and equal,” he was saying. “Free? They are hampered by inheritance and circumstance from the moment of birth. Equal? It is a self-evident lie. And the world has rhapsodized for a hundred years over so clumsy a statement. All men are born with equal rights. That is the precise statement. My rights—rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are equal to the rights of all the princelings of the earth; their rights equal only to mine. So far as they interfere with my rights they are public enemies, and are to be dealt with; and so far as I interfere with their rights, I am a trespasser to be punished. Otherwise, prince or peasant, each is a man, whether he wears a blouse or a star and garter; and if man was made in the image of God, let us do no indignity to that image in one or in another.”
Did I understand him? Was Colonel Vorse proclaiminghimself the equal of Prince San Sorcererino who had entertained us in his palaces last year? Well. And was he not? All at once something seemed to sift away from before my eyes—a veil that had hidden my kind from me. Was there no longer even that natural aristocracy in which Shakspeare or Homer or Dante was king? Was the world a brotherhood, and they the public enemy, the enemy of the great perfect race to come, who helped one brother take advantage of another? Were those ribbons in the buttonhole, the gifts of kings, of no more worth than the ribbons of cigars?
Mrs. Montresor was toying with her fan beside me, and talking in an undertone behind it. “What prince of all that you have seen or read of,” said she, “if born on a meagre mountain farm, would have made his fortune and have educated himself, as this man has done? I think the kings who founded races of kings were like him. And what prince of them all alive looks so much the prince as he? This one as fat as Falstaff and as low, that one with a hump on his back, the other without brains, the next with brains awry, and none of them made as becomes a man. Tell me, Helena?”
“I think you are in love yourself,” I said.
She laughed. “As tall as Saul, as dark, as lordly in all proportions, as gentle as Jonathan, and with a soul like David’s—why shouldn’t I be?” she said. “And he not the equal of the granddaughter of a South Carolina planter! Tell me again,Helena, what has she ever done to prove herself his equal?”
She had had a fancy—Heaven knows why—that her young mother, who had run away with her father, was the daughter of a noble foreign family; or else why should the match have been clandestine? She had had a fancy that she was therefore noble, as her mother was—the mother even whose name her child did not know other than as the slaves had told her the young bridegroom called her Pansy because of a pair of purple-dark eyes. That was about all. That was all the answer I could have made, had I spoken, to her gentle raillery, half mockery, in which she did not quite believe herself. But even were it so, and the daughter noble as the mother, could blood that had filtered through generations of oppressors lounging in laps of luxury be pure as this blood that had informed none but simple and innocent lives, and seemed just now as if it had come fresh from the hands of the Maker? I surveyed him from behind the hand-screen that failed to keep the ruddy flames from my face, and if I felt him in that glance to be one of the sons of God, and I but one of the daughters of men, again I did not tell Mrs. Montresor.
But the witch could always read my thoughts. “Still,” she said, “he has kept a tavern. There is no getting round that fact by all the poetry in the world. Then why try to get round it? He has furnished food and shelter to the tired and roofless—as noble a way to make money, surely, as workingthe bones and muscles of slaves, and accepting the gold they earn.”
“That is the last I have of such gold,” I cried, in a stifled way; and I unclasped the old bracelet on my wrist and tossed it behind the back-log—people were too gayly engaged to observe us at the moment. “I think,” I said then, turning upon her, “that you are employed as an advocate, unless—you are really weary of me.”
“Weary of you!” she exclaimed, half under her breath though it was—“weary of you, when you are such unceasing variety to me that if you married ten thousand tavern-keepers I should always have a room in the inn!”
“Thank Heaven,” I answered her, gayly, “it is an impossibility that I should ever marryone.” And then there was a lull in the laughter and the snatches of song and conversation on the other side of the room; and while I was still gazing after my bracelet and into the chimney-place, where the flames wallowed about unhewn forest logs that took two men to cast to them, Colonel Vorse came over to us.
“You will turn into salamanders,” he said.
“It is bad enough to be in hot water,” said Mrs. Montresor, lightly. “I will leave the fire to you and Helena.”
“Where you sit,” said Colonel Vorse then to me, “if you turn your head slightly to the left, and shade your eyes, you can see the side of the darkest and sternest of our mountains. You know we donot call our hills by the names they have in maps and government surveys; the old settlers who first came here called this one, for unknown reasons of their own, the Mount of Sorrow. It has always been the Mount of Sorrow.”
“An ominous name for so near a neighbor,” I said.
“Ah! you think this region is oppressive, or perhaps dull and tame, without life or stir—desolate, in fact. What if I should tell you that it bubbles, like a caldron over the bottomless pit, with griefs and sins!—that in lives condemned to perpetual imprisonment on these bare rocks, feeding on themselves, traits intensifying, the loneliness, the labor, the negation, slowly extract the juices of humanity, and make crime a matter to be whispered of among them? If they feel they are forgotten by God, what matters the murder or the suicide more or less that gives release? It is hell here or hell there: they are sure of this—they have it; the other may not come to pass.”
“What do you mean?” I said, with white lips; for as he spoke it seemed as if I had come into a land of lepers. “Here in this white solitude, among lives fed from the primitive sources of nature and the dew of the morning—”
“I mean,” he said, “that I refuse to accept the factitious aid your thoughts have lately been bringing to me. You see I have preternatural senses. Because I was born in the snows of the mountains I am no whit whiter than those born in the purlieusof the police stations of the cities. We are simply of the same human nature. When I win regard, it must be for no idle fancy, but for my own identity.”
“Well,” I said, “I do not believe you.”
“Ah!” he replied, “have I gained a point, and found an advocate in an ideal of me? That would be as romantic as any of the romance of the hills. And thereisromance here, whether it is born of crime, or of joy, or of sorrow. There is romance enough on that old Mount of Sorrow that you see when the storm opens and strips it in that sudden white glory. Keep your eye, if you please, on a spot half-way up the sky, and when the apparition comes again you will find the dark outline of a dwelling there. It was a dwelling once; now it is only a ruin, hut and barn and byre. Why do you shudder? Do you see it? It is only a shadow. But a shadow with outlines black enough to defy the whitest blast that ever blew. Sometimes it seems to me as though that old ruin were itself a ghostly thing, a spectre of tragedies that will not down; for the avalanches divide and leave it, and the storms whistle over and beat against it, and it is always there when the sun rises. I don’t know what it has to do with my fortunes; I don’t know why it is a blotch upon the face of nature to me; but if ever I grow sad or sick at heart I feel as though I should be made whole again could that evil thing be removed.”
“Why not remove it?”
“It does not belong to me. I can do nothing with it. I am not sure that it belongs to any one—which adds to the spectral, you see—although I suppose there is somewhere a nameless heir. How restless you are!” he said, gently. “Will you come out in the long hall where the great window gives an unobstructed view of the thing, and walk off this nervousness? The storm is lifting, I think; the moon is going to overcome. One may see by the way the fire burns that the temperature is mounting. Perhaps we shall have a snow-slide as we walk.”
Rhoda and Merivale were singing some of the songs they had learned since they came into the hill country, Mrs. Montresor was nodding behind her fan an accompaniment to Dr. Devens’s remarks, Adèle was deep in her novel, and a flirtation and some portfolios of prints occupied the rest. To refuse was only to attract attention; besides, I should like to walk. I rose and went out with him into the hall that shut off the wing from the great empty caravansary.
“‘And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor,’”
I quoted as we walked; and despite the fire burning on either side, he had brought me a fur for my shoulders.
“Yes,” he said, “there comes the moon at last. Now you shall see the black and white of it.”
“Oh!” I cried, clasping my hands, as all the silvery lights and immense shadows burst out in aterrible sort of radiance. “The world began to be made here! Poets should be born here!”
“Instead of tavern-keepers,” said he, “which brings me to my story. I am forty-three years old. Of course I was younger twenty-three years ago. That must have been not long before you came into the world yourself. Do you insist upon thinking twenty years’ difference in age makes any disparity, except in the case of him who has lost just that twenty years’ sweetness out of his life?”
“I hardly see what that has to do with the story of the Mount of Sorrow,” I said, as we turned from the window to measure the length of the hall again.
“I hope,” said he, “that the suffrage reform, which is to admit women to the ballot, will never let them sit on the judicial bench, for mercy is foreign to the heart of a woman.”
“Is it not a strange way of telling a story?” I exclaimed.
“Patience!” he laughed. “The story is so short it needs a little preface. As I was saying then, when I was twenty years old or so, the name of old Raynier, of the Mount of Sorrow, was a by-word of terror through the region round, as the name of his father was, and his father before him. He had no other property than the sterile farm half-way up the mountain, and almost inaccessible—in winter entirely inaccessible—where he raised not half a support on the slips of earth among the ledges; his few starved sheep and goats did what they could for him, and his rifle did the rest. The first Raynier ofthem all was possibly an escaped convict, who fortified his retreat by these mountain-sides. He had no money; the women spun and wove all that was worn. He had no education; no Raynier had ever had; no Raynier had ever had occasion to sign his mark, let alone his name. There had been one son in each generation; neither church nor school ever saw him; his existence was scarcely known till he was ready to marry, and then he came down, and by no one knows what other magic than a savage force of nature took the prettiest girl of the valley to his eyrie—sometimes his wife, sometimes not. When she died, and she always died, the Raynier of the day replaced her. He did not always wait for her to die before replacing her. But sudden deaths were no uncommon thing in that house; there was a burial-ground scooped in the hill-side. And who was there to interfere? Perhaps no one knew there had been a death till the year was out. What if a woman went mad? That happened anywhere. People below might prate of murder, or suicide, or slow poison; there was nobody to whom it was vital enough to open the question seriously; and then they feared the Raynier with an uncanny fear, as people fear a catamount in the woods, or the goblin of old wives’ tales after dark. There were horrible stories of bouts and brawls, of tortures, gags, whips, and—oh, no matter! Nor was all the crime on the shoulders of the Raynier men. It was understood that more than one woman of the name found life too intolerable to endure its conditionswhen the fumes of a charcoal fire after a drunken feast, or a quick thrust over the edge of a precipice, or a bit of weed in the broth, made life easier, till remorse brought madness. And finally, if any Raynier died what may be called a natural death, it was either from starvation or from delirium tremens. You see they were a precious lot.”
“A precious lot!” I said, trembling. “Ah, what is heaven made of? Poor wretches, they could not help it. From generation to generation the children of such people must needs be criminal.”
“I don’t know. If removed from such influence. To my mind environment is strong as heredity, quite as strong. It destroys the old and creates the new. However, environment and heredity worked together up there. In my day—to continue—the Raynier family was larger than usual. The last wife still lived, a miserable cowed creature, white as ashes, face and hair and bleached scared eyes, eyes that looked as if they saw phantoms rather than people. Her mind was partially gone. I was a famous mountaineer then, and climbing wherever foot of man had been before, I once in a while came upon some or other of that family, and sometimes paused at the door, where I had first to teach the bloodhounds a lesson. I never entered the filthy place but once. There were two sons and a daughter. Oh, how immortally beautiful that girl was! Such velvet darkness in the eye, such statuesque lines, such rose-leaf color, such hair—‘hair like the thistle-down tinted with gold,’ as John Mills, theScotch poet-player, sang. The old man Raynier worshipped her, perhaps as a wild beast loves its whelp. But he had all sorts of fanciful names for her, Heart’s-ease and Heart’s Delight, and Violet and Rose and Lily. He grew almost gentle when he spoke to her; and he never knew that she was feeble-minded. She just missed being an imbecile. Perhaps you would not have known that all at once; you might not have found it out at all only meeting her casually. The old man Raynier sent her down to school—the first that had ever been there: she could never learn to read. She could not always tell her name. Still, her mind was innocent—perhaps because it was a blank. I have sometimes thought that blank mind of hers may have been a dead-wall through which the vices of her forebears could not pass, and so her children, if she had them, may have escaped the inheritance, and found a chance for good again, as if crime should at last estop itself. That may be.”
“Oh, I think this is terrible!” I said, as we turned again in our walk. “Make haste, please, and be through.”
“Yes, it is. But I would show you that life can be anything but commonplace in this wilderness. Well, blank or not, she had a lover, who had found her out in his sketching rambles, a young painter from some distant parts, and the first boarder I ever had, by the way. And all the Rayniers swore they would have his life sooner than he should have her. One day I had been hunting on old MountSorrow, as it happened; there had been a sudden frost following rain that had frozen the water in the cracks of the cliffs, and made the way not only slippery, but dangerous; for in the heat of the noon sun the ice was melting, and every now and then its expansion was rending some fragment of rock so that your footing might vanish from beneath, or some shower of stones come rattling down from above; and I was tired when I reached the Raynier place, led by a blaze of maple boughs that started out like torches to show the way, and stopped to rest. I looked up at an enormous shelf of rock, half clad with reddened vines that fluttered like pestilence flags—a shelf that, although some hundred feet or so away from it, yet overhung the place and cast a perpetual shadow there. I wondered then why Nature had no secret springs of feeling to thrill her and cause her to rend the rocks and cover such a den of iniquity as we all held the spot to be. But Nature was just as fair that ambrosial September day as if there was not a dissonance. Perhaps she knew the right of the Rayniers to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A delicious scent of the balsam from the pines filled the air, the sunshine swept over the hills below in waves of light, and the hills themselves were like waves of a golden green and purple sea where now and then a rainbow swam and broke. Peace and perfectness, I said, peace and perfectness. These people live and are happy. On the other side one looked into the dreary defile of themountain gate, with its black depths hung with cloud, and remembered that if there was not a hell, there ought to be. I was thinking this as I sat there, when I heard a wild cry, an agonized shriek, blood-curdling, repeated and repeated from within. It was the girl’s voice. I was on my feet, and, in spite of the bloodhounds, making for the spot and among the crew. The old woman cowered in the corner, the two brothers held the girl, the old man towered over her, his great eyes blazing in his ashen face. I can’t tell you what they were doing. Sometimes I have thought old Raynier was burning her with a hot iron he held—”
“Oh, horrible! horrible!”
“Burning her with a hot iron to make her give up her lover! Sometimes I have thought he was only demolishing the little likenesses of him and of herself, which that lover had painted, and which she cherished, perhaps as his work, perhaps for the unwonted gewgaw of the slender golden frame, for the one picture was already in fragments, and although she clutched half of the other, the broken half had fallen and rolled away. I have it somewhere. I will show it to you. I had no time, indeed, to see what it was they were doing, for behind me bounded that lover like a whirlwind, thrust one brother and the other aside, seized the girl, darted over the door-sill with her, and down the crags of the mountain path. He should have what help I could give. I was after him, stooping to catch up the fragment of painting as I turned, down thecliff’s edge, they following. And all at once I stopped as if paralyzed to the marrow by a clap of thunder, and turned my head to see the old man with his white hair streaming, and his arms uplifted in his cursing, as he came leaping on, and the next moment the shelf of overhanging rock had fallen, had cleft the house in twain, and mother and father and sons and hounds were dust with the dust flying over the precipices. I saw it.”
“Oh!” I cried, with my hands over my eyes. “Why did it not strike you blind?”
“And here,” said Colonel Vorse, leading my steps to an old cabinet in an alcove, “ought to be the half of that little likeness I picked up as I ran. I wonder what became of the other half—what became of the girl—if the lover married her—if she knew enough to know he didn’t marry her—if she lived long enough for him to find out she was a fool—if she was the last of the Rayniers?” As he ceased, he put the half of the little miniature into my hands.
It was a broken bit of ivory, and on it the upper part of a face, sketchily done, with pansy-dark eyes and blush rose skin—without a frame. I had the frame.
A heart beat, a fluttering breath, a reeling sense of the world staggering away from me, and then my bewildered senses were at work again, and an agony like death was cutting me to the heart as we resumed our walking.
Should I tell him? Should I go on with my secret, my inheritance, my curse, and let no manknow? If it ate out my heart, the sooner to end; my heart was broken now. Never, never now could fireside shine for me, could lover’s lips be mine, could little faces sun themselves in my smile.
We paused before the great window, with those vague white shapes before us, for my feet would not obey me, and the light behind us shone on the bit of ivory. If I told him, it would be easier for him to bear; he would see the impossibility, he would desire my love no longer. My fearful inheritance would yawn like a gulf between us with its impassable darkness.
“And the ruin on the hill-side is an eye-sore,” I said. “But it is easy to remove it. I suppose it belongs to me. For—look here—it is I who must be the last of the Rayniers.” And I drew from my breast the broken thing, the halved miniature, that in my mock sentiment I had worn so long.
“You!” cried he. “You!” And his feet tottered, and he leaned against the casement for support—he who an hour or so ago had seemed so full of repressed strength that he could have pulled his house down about his ears. Well, had he not done so?
I moved to his side, and held the thing that he might see where the pieces matched, the line of the cheek flowing into the lovely curve of the chin, the flickering sweetness of the lovely mouth, the lambent glance of the lovely eye. “It is my mother, you see,” I said. “And it needs no words to say it.”
“It needs no words to say it,” he repeated,hoarsely. “It is your image. Oh, my God! What have I done! what have I done! My darling, my darling, you must let me repair it by a lifetime of devotion.” And he had his arms about me, and was drawing me to his heaving breast, his throbbing heart.
“No! no! no!” I sobbed. “It is impossible. I am wrecked; I am ruined; I can be no man’s wife. You see yourself—I will never—” But his lips were silencing mine, and I lay there with those arms about me a moment; I lay there like one in heaven suspended over hell.
“What do I care,” he whispered, “for all the Rayniers in Christendom or out of it, but you? I have learned in this moment that you love me! I will never give you up.”
“You must,” I groaned.
“I tell you I never will,” he said, his voice husky and low and trembling, but his eye and his grasp firm. “I have assured you that environment, education, art, can supplement nature and heredity. They have done so with you. You are your father’s child. You received from your mother only the vital spark, only this beauty, this fatal beauty. If you inherited all that the Rayniers ever had, then I love, I love, I love all that the Rayniers ever were, for I love you. I have your love, Helena, and I will never let you go.” While speaking he had touched the bell at his hand, and now he sent the answering servant for Dr. Devens, who came atonce, supposing some sight of the snow was in store.
“Bid them all out here, Doctor,” cried Colonel Vorse. “Ah, here they come! In this part of the country we need no license for marriage. Here are a bride and groom awaiting your blessing. Perform your office, sir.” And before I could summon heart or voice, making no response, bewildered and faint, I was the wife of Colonel Vorse, and my husband’s arms were supporting me as the words of the prayer and benediction rolled over us.
“There is no time like the present,” he cried, gayly, his tones no longer broken, “as I have always found.” And suddenly, before he ceased, and while they all thronged round me, there came a sharp strange sigh singing through the air, that grew into the wild discordant music of multitudinous echoes, and we all turned and sprang intuitively to see, rent in the moonlight and sheathed in the glorious spray of a thousand ice-falls, the Mount of Sorrow bow its head and come down, and, while the whole earth shook and smoked back in hoar vapors, the great snow-slide in its swift sheeting splendor flash and wipe out before our eyes the last timber of the hut and barn and byre of the Rayniers.
By Mary Agnes Tincker.
⁂Lippincott’s Magazine, December, 1878.
MonteCompatri is one of the eastern outlying peaks of the Alban Mountains, and, like so many Italian mountains, has its road climbing to and fro in long loops to a gray little city at the top. This city of Monte Compatri is a full and busy hive, with solid blocks of houses, and the narrowest of streets that break now and then into stairs. For those old builders respected the features of a landscape as though they had been the features of a face, and no more thought of levelling inequalities of land than of shaving down or raising up noses. When a man had a house-lot in a hollow, he built his house there, and made steps to go down to it: his neighbor, who owned a rocky knoll, built his house at the top, and made stairs to go up to it. Moreover, if the land was a bit in the city, the house was made in the shape ofit, and was as likely to have corners in obtuse or acute as in right angles.
The inhabitants of Monte Compatri have two streets of which they are immensely proud—the Lungara, which wriggles through the middle of the town, and the Giro, which makes the entire circuit of the town, leaving outside only the rim of houses that rise from the edge of the mountain, some of them founded on the natural rock, others stretching roots of masonry far down into the earth.
One of these houses on the Giro had for generations been in the possession of the Guai family. One after another had held it at an easy rent from Prince Borghese, the owner of the town. The vineyard and orchard below in the Campagna they owned, and from those their wealth was derived. For it was wealth for such people to have a house full of furniture, linen and porcelain—where, perhaps, a connoisseur might have found some rare bits of old china—besides having a thousand scudi in bank.
In this position was the head of the family when he died, leaving a grown-up son and daughter, and his wife about to become a mother for the third time.
“Pepina shall have her portion in money, since she is to marry soon,” the father said. “Give her three hundred scudi in gold and a hundred in pearls. The rest of the money shall be for my wife to do as she likes with. For the little one, when it shall come, Matteo shall put in the bankevery year thirty scudi, and when it shall be of age, be it girl or boy, he shall divide the land equally with it.”
So said Giovanni Guai, and died, and his wife let him talk uncontradicted, since it was for the last time. They had lived a stormy life, his heavy fist opposed to her indefatigable tongue, and she contemplated with silent triumph the prospect of being left in possession of the field. Besides, would he not see afterward what she did—see and be helpless to oppose? So she let him die fancying that he had disposed of his property.
“The child is sure to be a girl,” she said afterward, “and I mean her to be a nun. The land shall not be cut up. Matteo shall be a rich man and pile up a fortune. He shall be the richest man in Monte Compatri, and a girl shall not stand in his way.”
Nature verified the mother’s prophecy and sent a little girl. Silvia they called her, and, since she was surely to be a nun, she grew to be called Sister Silvia by everybody, even before she was old enough to recognize her own name.
The house of the Guai, on its inner wall, opened on the comparatively quiet Giro. From the windows and door could be heard the buzz and hum of the Lungara, where everybody—men, women, children, cats and dogs—were out with every species of work and play when the sun began to decline. This was the part of the house most frequented and liked by the family. They could see their neighborseven when they were at work in their houses, and could exchange gossip and stir the polenta at the same time. The other side of the house they avoided. It was lonely and it was sunny. For Italians would have the sun, like the Lord, to be for ever knocking at the door and for ever shut out. It must shine upon their outer walls, but not by any means enter their windows.
As years passed, however, there grew to be one exception in this regard. Sister Silvia loved not the town with its busy streets, nor the front windows with their gossiping heads thrust out or in. She had her own chamber on the Campagna side, and there she sat the livelong day with knitting or sewing, never going out, except at early morning to hear mass. There her mother accompanied her—a large, self-satisfied woman beside a pallid little maiden who never raised her eyes. Or, if her mother could not go, Matteo stalked along by her side, and with his black looks made everybody afraid to glance her way. Nobody liked to encounter the two black eyes of Matteo Guai. It was understood that the knife in his belt was sharp, and that no scruple of conscience would stand between him and any vengeance he might choose to take for any affront he might choose to imagine.
After mass, then, and the little work her mother permitted the girl to do for health’s sake, Silvia sat alone by her window and looked out on the splendor which her eyes alone could appreciate. There lay the Campagna rolling and waving for milesand miles around, till the Sabines, all rose and amethyst, hemmed it in with their exquisite wall, and the sea curved a gleaming sickle to cut off its flowery passage, or the nearer mountains stood guard, almost covered by the green spray it threw up their rocky sides. She sat and stared at Rome while her busy fingers knit—at the wonderful city where she was one day to go and be a nun, where the pope lived and kings came to worship him. In the morning light the Holy City lay in the midst of the Campagna like her mother’s wedding-pearls when dropped in a heap on their green cushion; and Silvia knelt with her face that way and prayed for a soul as white, for she was to be the spouse of Christ, and her purity was all that she could bring Him as a dowry. But when evening came, and that other airy sea of fine golden mist flowed in from the west, and made a gorgeous blur of all things, then the city seemed to float upward from the earth and rise toward heaven all stirring with the wings of its guardian angels, and Silvia would beg that the New Jerusalem might not be assumed till she should have the happiness of being in it.
But there was a lovely view nearer than this visionary one, though the little nun seldom looked at it. If she should lean from her window she would see the mountain-side dropping from the gray walls of her home, with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the olives and grapevines of the Campagna came to meet them, setting here and there a precarious little gardenhalf-way up the steep. Just under her window an almost perpendicular path came up, crept round the walls and entered the town. But no one ever used this road now, for a far wider and better one had been constructed at the other side of the mountain, and all the people came up that way when the day’s work was over in the Campagna.
One summer afternoon Silvia’s reveries were broken by her mother’s voice calling her: “Silvia, come and prepare the salad for Matteo.”
It was an extraordinary request, but the girl went at once without question. She seized upon every opportunity to practise obedience in preparation for that time when her life would be made up of obedience and prayer.
Her mother was sitting by one of the windows talking with Matteo, who had just come up from the Campagna. He had an unsocial habit of eating alone, and, as he ate nothing when down in the vineyard, always wanted his supper as soon as he came up. The table was set for him with snow-white cloth and napkin, silver knife, fork and spoon, a loaf of bread and a decanter of golden-sparkling wine icy cold from the grotto hewn in the rock beneath the house; and he was just eating hisminestraof vegetables when his sister came in. At the other end of the long table was a head of crisp white lettuce, lying on a clean linen towel, and two bottles—one of white vinegar, the other of oil as sweet as cream and as bright as sunshine. Monte Compatri had no need to send to Lucca foroil of olives while its own orchards dropped such streams of pure richness.
The room was large and dingy. The brick floor had never known other cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared under a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not remove, and the glass of the windows had never been washed except by the rain. Yet, for all that, the place had an air of cleanliness. For though these people do not clean their houses more than they clean their yards, yet their clothing and tables and beds are clean. Plentiful white linen, stockings like snow, and bright dishes and metals give a look of freshness and show well on the dim background. Heavy walnut presses, carved and black with age, stood against the walls, drinking-glasses and candlesticks sparkled on a dark bureau-top, there was a bright picture or two, and the sunlighted tinware of a house at the other side of the street threw a cluster of tiny rays like a bouquet of light in at the window. Silvia received these sun-blossoms on her head when she placed herself at the lower end of the table. She pushed the sleeves of her white sack back from her slim white arms, and began washing the lettuce-leaves in a bowl of fresh water and breaking them in the towel. The leaves broke with a fine snap and dropped in pieces as stiff as paper into a large dark-blue plate of old Japanese ware. A connoisseur in porcelain would have setsuch a plate on his drawing-room wall as a picture.
“How does Claudio work?” the mother asked of her son.
“He works well,” Matteo replied. “He is worth two of our common fellows, if heiseducated.”
“Nevertheless, I should not have employed him,” the mother said. “He has disobeyed and disappointed his parents, and he should be punished. They meant him to be a priest, and raked and scraped every soldo to educate him. Now, just when he is at the point of being able to repay them, he makes up his mind that he has no vocation for the priesthood, and breaks their hearts by his ingratitude. It is nonsense to set one’s will up so and have such scruples. Obedience is vocation enough for anything. There should be a prison where parents could put the children who disobey them.”