Crucial Instances by Edith Wharton

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On the third afternoon, as I was leaving the office, an agate-eyed infant
from the Point hailed me with a message from the doctor. The _parocco_
was worse and had asked for me. I jumped into the nearest car and ten
minutes later was running up the doctor's greasy stairs.

To my dismay I found Don Egidio's room cold and untenanted; but I was
reassured a moment later by the appearance of the _levatrice_, who
announced that she had transferred the blessed man to her own apartment,
where he could have the sunlight and a good bed to lie in. There in fact
he lay, weak but smiling, in a setting which contrasted oddly enough with
his own monastic surroundings: a cheerful grimy room, hung with anecdotic
chromos, photographs of lady-patients proudly presenting their offspring
to the camera, and innumerable Neapolitan _santolini_ decked out with
shrivelled palm-leaves.

The _levatrice_ whispered that the good man had the pleurisy, and
that, as she phrased it, he was nearing his last mile-stone. I saw that he
was in fact in a bad way, but his condition did not indicate any pressing
danger, and I had the presentiment that he would still, as the saying is,
put up a good fight. It was clear, however, that he knew what turn the
conflict must take, and the solemnity with which he welcomed me showed that
my summons was a part of that spiritual strategy with which the Catholic
opposes the surprise of death.

"My son," he said, when the _levatrice_ had left us, "I have a favor
to ask you. You found me yesterday bidding good-bye to my best friend."
His cough interrupted him. "I have never told you," he went on, "the name
of the family in which I was brought up. It was Siviano, and that was
the grave of the Count's eldest son, with whom I grew up as a brother.
For eighteen years he has lain in that strange ground--_in terra
aliena_--and when I die, there will be no one to care for his grave."

I saw what he waited for. "I will care for it, _signor parocco_."

"I knew I should have your promise, my child; and what you promise you
keep. But my friend is a stranger to you--you are young and at your age
life is a mistress who kisses away sad memories. Why should you remember
the grave of a stranger? I cannot lay such a claim on you. But I will tell
you his story--and then I think that neither joy nor grief will let you
forget him; for when you rejoice you will remember how he sorrowed; and
when you sorrow the thought of him will be like a friend's hand in yours."

II

You tell me (Don Egidio began) that you know our little lake; and if you
have seen it you will understand why it always used to remind me of the
"garden enclosed" of the Canticles.

_Hortus inclusus; columba mea in foraminibus petræ_: the words used
to come back to me whenever I returned from a day's journey across the
mountains, and looking down saw the blue lake far below, hidden in its
hills like a happy secret in a stern heart. We were never envious of
the glory of the great lakes. They are like the show pictures that some
nobleman hangs in his public gallery; but our Iseo is the treasure that
he hides in his inner chamber.

You tell me you saw it in summer, when it looks up like a saint's eye,
reflecting the whole of heaven. It was then too that I first saw it.
My future friend, the old Count, had found me at work on one of his
fruit-farms up the valley, and hearing that I was ill-treated by my
step-father--a drunken pedlar from the Val Mastellone, whom my poor mother
a year or two earlier had come across at the fair of Lovere--he had taken
me home with him to Iseo. I used to serve mass in our hill-village of
Cerveno, and the village children called me "the little priest" because
when my work was done I often crept back to the church to get away from
my step-father's blows and curses. "I will make a real priest of him,"
the Count declared; and that afternoon, perched on the box of his
travelling-carriage, I was whirled away from the dark scenes of my
childhood into a world, where, as it seemed to me, every one was as happy
as an angel on a _presepio_.

I wonder if you remember the Count's villa? It lies on the shore of the
lake, facing the green knoll of Monte Isola, and overlooked by the village
of Siviano and by the old parish-church where I said mass for fifteen happy
years. The village hangs on a ledge of the mountain; but the villa dips its
foot in the lake, smiling at its reflection like a bather lingering on the
brink. What Paradise it seemed to me that day! In our church up the valley
there hung an old brown picture, with a Saint Sabastian in the foreground;
and behind him the most wonderful palace, with terraced gardens adorned
with statues and fountains, where fine folk in resplendent dresses walked
up and down without heeding the blessed martyr's pangs. The Count's villa,
with its terraces, its roses, its marble steps descending to the lake,
reminded me of that palace; only instead of being inhabited by wicked
people engrossed in their selfish pleasures it was the home of the kindest
friends that ever took a poor lad by the hand.

The old Count was a widower when I first knew him. He had been twice
married, and his first wife had left him two children, a son and a
daughter. The eldest, Donna Marianna, was then a girl of twenty, who
kept her father's house and was a mother to the two lads. She was not
handsome or learned, and had no taste for the world; but she was like the
lavender-plant in a poor man's window--just a little gray flower, but a
sweetness that fills the whole house. Her brother, Count Roberto, had been
ailing from his birth, and was a studious lad with a melancholy musing face
such as you may see in some of Titian's portraits of young men. He looked
like an exiled prince dressed in mourning. There was one child by the
second marriage, Count Andrea, a boy of my own age, handsome as a Saint
George, but not as kind as the others. No doubt, being younger, he was less
able to understand why an uncouth peasant lad should have been brought to
his father's table; and the others were so fearful of hurting my feelings
that, but for his teasing, I might never have mended my clumsy manners or
learned how to behave in the presence of my betters. Count Andrea was not
sparing in such lessons, and Count Roberto, in spite of his weak arms,
chastised his brother roundly when he thought the discipline had been too
severe; but for my part it seemed to me natural enough that such a godlike
being should lord it over a poor clodhopper like myself.

Well--I will not linger over the beginning of my new life for my story has
to do with its close. Only I should like to make you understand what the
change meant to me--an ignorant peasant lad, coming from hard words and
blows and a smoke-blackened hut in the hills to that great house full of
rare and beautiful things, and of beings who seemed to me even more rare
and beautiful. Do you wonder I was ready to kiss the ground they trod, and
would have given the last drop of my blood to serve them?

In due course I was sent to the seminary at Lodi; and on holidays I used
to visit the family in Milan. Count Andrea was growing up to be one of
the handsomest young men imaginable, but a trifle wild; and the old Count
married him in haste to the daughter of a Venetian noble, who brought as
her dower a great estate in Istria. The Countess Gemma, as this lady was
called, was as light as thistledown and had an eye like a baby's; but while
she was cooing for the moon her pretty white hands were always stealing
toward something within reach that she had not been meant to have. The old
Count was not alert enough to follow these manoeuvres; and the Countess hid
her designs under a torrent of guileless chatter, as pick-pockets wear long
sleeves to conceal their movements. Her only fault, he used to say, was
that one of her aunts had married an Austrian; and this event having taken
place before she was born he laughingly acquitted her of any direct share
in it. She confirmed his good opinion of her by giving her husband two
sons; and Roberto showing no inclination to marry, these boys naturally
came to be looked on as the heirs of the house.

Meanwhile I had finished my course of studies, and the old Count, on my
twenty-first birthday, had appointed me priest of the parish of Siviano. It
was the year of Count Andrea's marriage and there were great festivities at
the villa. Three years later the old Count died, to the sorrow of his two
eldest children. Donna Marianna and Count Roberto closed their apartments
in the palace at Milan and withdrew for a year to Siviano. It was then
that I first began to know my friend. Before that I had loved him without
understanding him; now I learned of what metal he was made. His bookish
tastes inclined him to a secluded way of living; and his younger brother
perhaps fancied that he would not care to assume the charge of the estate.
But if Andrea thought this he was disappointed. Roberto resolutely took up
the tradition of his father's rule, and, as if conscious of lacking the
old Count's easy way with the peasants, made up for it by a redoubled zeal
for their welfare. I have seen him toil for days to adjust some trifling
difficulty that his father would have set right with a ready word; like the
sainted bishop who, when a beggar asked him for a penny, cried out: "Alas,
my brother, I have not a penny in my purse; but here are two gold pieces,
if they can be made to serve you instead!" We had many conferences over
the condition of his people, and he often sent me up the valley to look
into the needs of the peasantry on the fruit-farms. No grievance was too
trifling for him to consider it, no abuse too deep-seated for him to root
it out; and many an hour that other men of his rank would have given to
books or pleasure was devoted to adjusting a quarrel about boundary-lines
or to weighing the merits of a complaint against the tax-collector. I
often said that he was as much his people's priest as I; and he smiled and
answered that every landowner was a king and that in old days the king was
always a priest.

Donna Marianna was urgent with him to marry, but he always declared that
he had a family in his tenantry, and that, as for a wife, she had never
let him feel the want of one. He had that musing temper which gives a man
a name for coldness; though in fact he may all the while be storing fuel
for a great conflagration. But to me he whispered another reason for not
marrying. A man, he said, does not take wife and rejoice while his mother
is on her death-bed; and Italy, his mother, lay dying, with the foreign
vultures waiting to tear her apart.

You are too young to know anything of those days, my son; and how can any
one understand them who did not live through them? Italy lay dying indeed;
but Lombardy was her heart, and the heart still beat, and sent the faint
blood creeping to her cold extremities. Her torturers, weary of their
work, had allowed her to fall into a painless stupor; but just as she was
sinking from sleep to death, heaven sent Radetsky to scourge her back to
consciousness; and at the first sting of his lash she sprang maimed and
bleeding to her feet.

Ah, those days, those days, my son! Italy--Italy--was the word on our
lips; but the thought in our hearts was just _Austria_. We clamored
for liberty, unity, the franchise; but under our breath we prayed only to
smite the white-coats. Remove the beam from our eye, we cried, and we shall
see our salvation clearly enough! We priests in the north were all liberals
and worked with the nobles and the men of letters. Gioberti was our
breviary and his Holiness the new Pope was soon to be the Tancred of our
crusade. But meanwhile, mind you, all this went on in silence, underground
as it were, while on the surface Lombardy still danced, feasted, married,
and took office under the Austrian. In the iron-mines up our valley there
used to be certain miners who stayed below ground for months at a time;
and, like one of these, Roberto remained buried in his purpose, while life
went its way overhead. Though I was not in his confidence I knew well
enough where his thoughts were, for he went among us with the eye of a
lover, the visionary look of one who hears a Voice. We all heard that
Voice, to be sure, mingling faintly with the other noises of life; but to
Roberto it was already as the roar of mighty waters, drowning every other
sound with its thunder.

On the surface, as I have said, things looked smooth enough. An Austrian
cardinal throned in Milan and an Austrian-hearted Pope ruled in Rome. In
Lombardy, Austria couched like a beast of prey, ready to spring at our
throats if we stirred or struggled. The Moderates, to whose party Count
Roberto belonged, talked of prudence, compromise, the education of the
masses; but if their words were a velvet sheath their thought was a dagger.
For many years, as you know, the Milanese had maintained an outward show of
friendliness with their rulers. The nobles had accepted office under the
vice-roy, and in the past there had been frequent intermarriage between
the two aristocracies. But now, one by one, the great houses had closed
their doors against official society. Though some of the younger and more
careless, those who must dance and dine at any cost, still went to the
palace and sat beside the enemy at the opera, fashion was gradually taking
sides against them, and those who had once been laughed at as old fogeys
were now applauded as patriots. Among these, of course, was Count Roberto,
who for several years had refused to associate with the Austrians, and
had silently resented his easy-going brother's disregard of political
distinctions. Andrea and Gemma belonged to the moth tribe, who flock to
the brightest light; and Gemma's Istrian possessions, and her family's
connection with the Austrian nobility, gave them a pretext for fluttering
about the vice-regal candle. Roberto let them go their way, but his own
course was a tacit protest against their conduct. They were always welcome
at the palazzo Siviano; but he and Donna Marianna withdrew from society in
order to have an excuse for not showing themselves at the Countess Gemma's
entertainments. If Andrea and Gemma were aware of his disapproval they were
clever enough to ignore it; for the rich elder brother who paid their debts
and never meant to marry was too important a person to be quarrelled with
on political grounds. They seemed to think that if he married it would be
only to spite them; and they were persuaded that their future depended on
their giving him no cause to take such reprisals. I shall never be more
than a plain peasant at heart and I have little natural skill in discerning
hidden motives; but the experience of the confessional gives every priest
a certain insight into the secret springs of action, and I often wondered
that the worldly wisdom of Andrea and Gemma did not help them to a clearer
reading of their brother's character. For my part I knew that, in Roberto's
heart, no great passion could spring from a mean motive; and I had always
thought that if he ever loved any woman as he loved Italy, it must be from
his country's hand that he received his bride. And so it came about.

Have you ever noticed, on one of those still autumn days before a storm,
how here and there a yellow leaf will suddenly detach itself from the bough
and whirl through the air as though some warning of the gale had reached
it? So it was then in Lombardy. All round was the silence of decay; but now
and then a word, a look, a trivial incident, fluttered ominously through
the stillness. It was in '45. Only a year earlier the glorious death of the
Bandiera brothers had sent a long shudder through Italy. In the Romagna,
Renzi and his comrades had tried to uphold by action the protest set forth
in the "Manifesto of Rimini"; and their failure had sowed the seed which
d'Azeglio and Cavour were to harvest. Everywhere the forces were silently
gathering; and nowhere was the hush more profound, the least reverberation
more audible, than in the streets of Milan.

It was Count Roberto's habit to attend early mass in the Cathedral; and one
morning, as he was standing in the aisle, a young girl passed him with her
father. Roberto knew the father, a beggarly Milanese of the noble family of
Intelvi, who had cut himself off from his class by accepting an appointment
in one of the government offices. As the two went by he saw a group of
Austrian officers looking after the girl, and heard one of them say: "Such
a choice morsel as that is too good for slaves;" and another answer with a
laugh: "Yes, it's a dish for the master's table!"

The girl heard too. She was as white as a wind-flower and he saw the words
come out on her cheek like the red mark from a blow. She whispered to
her father, but he shook his head and drew her away without so much as
a glance at the Austrians. Roberto heard mass and then hastened out and
placed himself in the porch of the Cathedral. A moment later the officers
appeared, and they too stationed themselves near the doorway. Presently the
girl came out on her father's arm. Her admirers stepped forward to greet
Intelvi; and the cringing wretch stood there exchanging compliments with
them, while their insolent stare devoured his daughter's beauty. She,
poor thing, shook like a leaf, and her eyes, in avoiding theirs, suddenly
encountered Roberto's. Her look was a wounded bird that flew to him for
shelter. He carried it away in his breast and its live warmth beat against
his heart. He thought that Italy had looked at him through those eyes; for
love is the wiliest of masqueraders and has a thousand disguises at his
command.

Within a month Faustina Intelvi was his wife. Donna Marianna and I
rejoiced; for we knew he had chosen her because he loved her, and she
seemed to us almost worthy of such a choice. As for Count Andrea and his
wife, I leave you to guess what ingredients were mingled in the kiss with
which they welcomed the bride. They were all smiles at Roberto's marriage,
and had only words of praise for his wife. Donna Marianna, who had
sometimes taxed me with suspecting their motives, rejoiced in this fresh
proof of their magnanimity; but for my part I could have wished to see them
a little less kind. All such twilight fears, however, vanished in the flush
of my friend's happiness. Over some natures love steals gradually, as the
morning light widens across a valley; but it had flashed on Roberto like
the leap of dawn to a snow-peak. He walked the world with the wondering
step of a blind man suddenly restored to sight; and once he said to me with
a laugh: "Love makes a Columbus of every one of us!"

And the Countess--? The Countess, my son, was eighteen, and her husband was
forty. Count Roberto had the heart of a poet, but he walked with a limp and
his skin was sallow. Youth plucks the fruit for its color rather than its
flavor; and first love does not serenade its mistress on a church-organ. In
Italy girls are married as land is sold; if two estates adjoin two lives
are united. As for the portionless girl, she is a knick-knack that goes to
the highest bidder. Faustina was handed over to her purchaser as if she
had been a picture for his gallery; and the transaction doubtless seemed
as natural to her as to her parents. She walked to the altar like an
Iphigenia; but pallor becomes a bride, and it looks well for a daughter to
weep on leaving her mother. Perhaps it would have been different if she had
guessed that the threshold of her new home was carpeted with love and its
four corners hung with tender thoughts of her; but her husband was a silent
man, who never called attention to his treasures.

The great palace in Milan was a gloomy house for a girl to enter. Roberto
and his sister lived in it as if it had been a monastery, going nowhere and
receiving only those who labored for the Cause. To Faustina, accustomed to
the easy Austrian society, the Sunday evening receptions at the palazzo
Siviano must have seemed as dreary as a scientific congress. It pleased
Roberto to regard her as a victim of barbarian insolence, an embodiment of
his country desecrated by the desire of the enemy; but though, like any
handsome penniless girl, Faustina had now and then been exposed to a free
look or a familiar word, I doubt if she connected such incidents with the
political condition of Italy. She knew, of course, that in marrying Siviano
she was entering a house closed against the Austrian. One of Siviano's
first cares had been to pension his father-in-law, with the stipulation
that Intelvi should resign his appointment and give up all relations with
the government; and the old hypocrite, only too glad to purchase idleness
on such terms, embraced the liberal cause with a zeal which left his
daughter no excuse for half-heartedness. But he found it less easy than he
had expected to recover a footing among his own people. In spite of his
patriotic bluster the Milanese held aloof from him; and being the kind of
man who must always take his glass in company he gradually drifted back
to his old associates. It was impossible to forbid Faustina to visit her
parents; and in their house she breathed an air that was at least tolerant
of Austria.

But I must not let you think that the young Countess appeared ungrateful or
unhappy. She was silent and shy, and it needed a more enterprising temper
than Roberto's to break down the barrier between them. They seemed to talk
to one another through a convent-grating, rather than across a hearth; but
if Roberto had asked more of her than she could give, outwardly she was
a model wife. She chose me at once as her confessor and I watched over
the first steps of her new life. Never was younger sister tenderer to her
elder than she to Donna Marianna; never was young wife more mindful of her
religious duties, kinder to her dependents, more charitable to the poor;
yet to be with her was like living in a room with shuttered windows. She
was always the caged bird, the transplanted flower: for all Roberto's care
she never bloomed or sang.

Donna Marianna was the first to speak of it. "The child needs more light
and air," she said.

"Light? Air?" Roberto repeated. "Does she not go to mass every morning?
Does she not drive on the Corso every evening?"

Donna Marianna was not called clever, but her heart was wiser than most
women's heads.

"At our age, brother," said she, "the windows of the mind face north and
look out on a landscape full of lengthening shadows. Faustina needs another
outlook. She is as pale as a hyacinth grown in a cellar."

Roberto himself turned pale and I saw that she had uttered his own thought.

"You want me to let her go to Gemma's!" he exclaimed.

"Let her go wherever there is a little careless laughter."

"Laughter--now!" he cried, with a gesture toward the sombre line of
portraits above his head.

"Let her laugh while she can, my brother."

That evening after dinner he called Faustina to him.

"My child," he said, "go and put on your jewels. Your sister Gemma gives a
ball to-night and the carriage waits to take you there. I am too much of a
recluse to be at ease in such scenes, but I have sent word to your father
to go with you."

Andrea and Gemma welcomed their young sister-in-law with effusion, and from
that time she was often in their company. Gemma forbade any mention of
politics in her drawing-room, and it was natural that Faustina should be
glad to escape from the solemn conclaves of the palazzo Siviano to a house
where life went as gaily as in that villa above Florence where Boccaccio's
careless story-tellers took refuge from the plague. But meanwhile the
political distemper was rapidly spreading, and in spite of Gemma's Austrian
affiliations it was no longer possible for her to receive the enemy openly.
It was whispered that her door was still ajar to her old friends; but
the rumor may have risen from the fact that one of the Austrian cavalry
officers stationed at Milan was her own cousin, the son of the aunt on
whose misalliance the old Count had so often bantered her. No one could
blame the Countess Gemma for not turning her own flesh and blood out of
doors; and the social famine to which the officers of the garrison were
reduced made it natural that young Welkenstern should press the claims of
consanguinity.

All this must have reached Roberto's ears; but he made no sign and his wife
came and went as she pleased. When they returned the following year to the
old dusky villa at Siviano she was like the voice of a brook in a twilight
wood: one could not look at her without ransacking the spring for new
similes to paint her freshness. With Roberto it was different. I found him
older, more preoccupied and silent; but I guessed that his preoccupations
were political, for when his eye rested on his wife it cleared like the
lake when a cloud-shadow lifts from it.

Count Andrea and his wife occupied an adjoining villa; and during the
_villeggiatura_ the two households lived almost as one family.
Roberto, however, was often absent in Milan, called thither on business of
which the nature was not hard to guess. Sometimes he brought back guests to
the villa; and on these occasions Faustina and Donna Marianna went to Count
Andrea's for the day. I have said that I was not in his confidence; but
he knew my sympathies were with the liberals and now and then he let fall
a word of the work going on underground. Meanwhile the new Pope had been
elected, and from Piedmont to Calabria we hailed in him the Banner that was
to lead our hosts to war.

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