Bernard Capes

“ The growing scream and thunder of the town drove towards us as we advanced; but few people in that bitter night; until, skirting the massed buildings of the arsenal and palace, we emerged suddenly through a little lane into the Strada di St. Lucia, and paused a moment undecided and amazed.
It was as if the devil had taken his glowing pencil and ruled off this quarter of the city for his own. A noisome ravine of houses it was, with life like a fiery torrent brawling along its bed. Song and tumult and mad licence; fingers quick to stab, or to snap like castanets to a dancing child ”

“ Diana! You will find a way!”
“If you are strong—yes. I have been alert and watchful, child, while you never knew it. But he did; and he means to separate us; to rid himself of the watch-dog, that he may seize the lamb. He has but this moment told me I must go—with what coarseness and insult I will not soil your ears by repeating. If you love your honour, as I love and have sacrificed myself to save it, you must come with me.”
“I will come”—she rose hurriedly to her feet. “How can I ever repay you, sister? The old, wicked man! At once—Diana! let us fly at once!” ”

“ The soul ceases at the portals of the senses. The dross it carries with it alone goes on and in. We are but so many obstructions in the vast harmony—foreign bodies which it is for ever striving to penetrate and decompose. It focuses its burning light upon us; it takes the swimming heavens for its lens; and we die and are dissolved into it. Only in rare instances does the process wring from us a fine frenzy, or melt us into song; and then we see genius—genius, which fools call self-issuing, but which is really spirit reflected, like heat cast back from a wall. ”

“ He who is not content with an ignoble mediocrity, though he do no more than take pains with a letter, is a candidate for fame. And as for love, it does not exist on the highway. Why should it imply distinction to call a man an adventurer, and be invidious to style a woman adventuress? Ulysses dallying in Ææa is surely no more honourable a sight than Godiva traversing Coventry in an adorable deshabille. To have the wide outlook, the catholic sympathy—is that to merit defamation? No, it is to be heroically human. Better sin like an angel, I say, than be a sick devil and virtuous. ”

“ She schemed through all the virtues for the apotheosis of Lady Sophia, and she called her scheming the vindication of truth, which she held to be a Romish monopoly. She would have made me a nun, as part of it, and taken all the credit with Heaven. I can hardly regret that she was foiled. I love truth as well as any woman, only, being a woman, à contre-cœur, and not a saint, for me it must be coloured, and in the newest shades. To ask me to love it for its own sake is to ask me to be a dowd; and, for all my respect for Lady Sophia, I have never fancied a heaven of dowds. ”

“ It was at Oxford that I met and worshipped my first genius. He was a man of great family, an inspired naturalist, an unerring shot and rare sportsman. In those early days we had already planned an expedition together to the unexplored North Western ‘Rockies,’ for the purpose of making such a collection of their flora and fauna as should bring us wealth and reputation. Though the world of Nature seemed even too cramped a stage for my boundless lust of life, the prospect of those unspeakable teeming solitudes, inviting all that was most strenuous in me to conquer, was a certain solace in itself. ”

“ Patty uttered a tiny cry—
“O, Diana! It’s the portrait!”
In a moment, all excitement, we stole in a-tiptoe. The place was very still and ghostly. Only on the dusty canvas itself lay a melancholy grid of light. Palpitating in our sense of guilt, we turned the frame round, let it drop softly back again; and there, before our eyes, bloomed a smiling, wistful face. The light, which had saddened it in reverse, was quickened now to an illuminating glory. It greeted and dimpled to us—the face of a dead woman risen. ”

“ I AM CONSIGNED TO A GREEN GRAVE To you, my dear Alcide, conscience is, I know, a disease, and virtue its relapse. I do not, then, ask your sympathy, but only your commiseration in that long struggle with my better self in which I was now to engage—a struggle which found me child, and left me woman—a struggle through whose intermittent deliriums moved ever the sorrowful figure of my poor lost Gogo. ”

“ He seized me by the wrist, and dragged me towards the opened door.
“O, Gogo!” I choked, struggling and resisting, “we shall be seen.”
“What does it matter if we are,” he said fiercely, “since you loathe me?”
I wept and fondled him, in an agony of fear.
“I don’t loathe you. You are my one stay and comfort. Gogo! Will you give me back to that terror?”
He fell squatting at my feet—it was his substitute for kneeling—and clasped his arms about my skirt.
“Beast!” he groaned; “I neither meant nor could help it. To play upon your fears!—To taste love by deputy!—O, forgive me, forgive me!” ”

“ My fury had flashed to an explosion in that wicked falsehood.
Pissani, with a sudden and terrible cry at the sight of his mistress’s disgrace, drew a knife from his hip, and leapt like a goat across the table. Stumbling as he alighted, she caught him frantic round the knees, and held him raging and snarling while he stabbed at the air in his frenzy. I stood fallen back a little, white and scornful, but with not a thrill of fear at my heart; and, so standing, saw how, in the thick blindness of his rage, he was yet tender of her in his struggles to free himself. ”

“ As you regard me, as you value yourself, child, concede nothing to chance—not so much as a peep over the roof. Ay, I know your activity. But you must lie close as a hare if you would be safe—through these first days of peril, at least. Later, when the chase less presses, you may venture out, perhaps, by the ladder; but always with infinite caution, as you love me. Little sister, do you agree?”
I buried my face in my hands. My whole heart cried out on the cruel tyranny of a code that could let such monsters as this wreak their passions on the pure and innocent, and yet find absolution. ”

“ Smell to it when the world is dark, and your brain shall flash into light, like an inn to the tired traveller. Smell to it when your feet go sick and heavy, and you shall feel them like the birds’ whose bones are full of wind. But tell not of the gift or giver, lest I die!”
Involuntarily, as she spoke, I had raised the stone to my nostrils. A faint scent as of menthene intoxicated my brain. The downs and the sky swam before me in one luminous mist. Lightness and delight took all my soul and body with rapture.... ”

“ Still, it was true, the Sophia of to-day, however rejuvenated, was scarcely the model of that older time; and that he could finish that beautiful inspiration from her staider personality was what it was folly, perhaps, in her to expect.
Poor woman! Though I had my grudge, and no taste or reason to commiserate such vanity, I suffered some qualms of remorse for the part I was led to play. It is natural, after all, for the sex to see itself never so immortal as through the eyes of love; and, when a man has once praised its complexion, to claim for itself an eternity of roses. ”

“ For years I have helped to direct his career, have goaded his inspirations, cossetted his weaknesses. Ah, child! He is my child, made glorious by my faith in him. Do not seduce me from my allegiance to my child, and for the first time make me out of love with Nature!”
He ended with a groan, and flung himself prostrate on the floor, beating, I think, his forehead against it.
“Poor Gogo!” I said. “You have confessed; and so will I now. He is my child too. I adore him, and am so ravished by his art that I could not rest with thinking what he had made of the portrait. ”

“ As I loitered by those empty corridors of green, smiling back the smiles of the unruffled statues, listening to the drowsy thunder of the waters, seeing only for all tokens of human life the little marionnettes of place swarming, quite distant and minute, about the steps of the palace, France was preparing to launch her legions on Naples both by land and sea; scared refugee cardinals were trotting by the dozen into the city; Nelson, off Toulon, was shaping his course, by way of Aboukir, to the arms of Mrs. Hart; Ferdinand was tremblingly fastening his warlike greaves on his fat shins ”

“ He worked fitfully, dully, almost, as it were, disregarding my presence, and drawling commonplaces the while to Gogo, who had returned to his pestle and mortar, and was grinding away sullenly.
“Gogo,” he yawned presently, after an idle, preoccupied silence, “which would you rather marry, a woman of wit or virtue?”
“Neither, you blattering genius!” cried the other, turning round with such an instant roar that I was almost frightened off my perch. ”

“ That she would have done for me, I think, though they racked her to confess; and all might yet have gone well, had not the Lady Sophia, meddlesome like most self-righteous consciences, sent for her to question if, after all, her simple verses might not have been the instinctive expression of her leaning towards the cloister. My poor transparent angel managed to articulate a panic denial of any such tendency; though, indeed, there was no need to, to any but a blindworm. If ever little maid was built for loving, or to lay her pretty hair in a puddle for some rogue to reach heaven by, it was she. ”

“ The giggling servants paused in their task to stare up; but the monster himself laboured round, with quite a stunned look.
“To help—me,” he whispered hoarsely; “the little scented rush to prop the oak!”
I was in love with his changed voice at once. It was something to meet only two-thirds of a man.
“No, no,” he said, touching my arm as if it were a relic. “I’m Gogo, the colour-grinder, the bottle-washer—not worthy to latch your ladyship’s little shoe. I’ll go down—I’ll go down. Ho-ho! it’s easy. I’ve done it all my life.” ”

“ But O, Diana! I don’t want to be a nun.”
I comforted her, though furious with the others for their Jesuitical practices on her innocence.
“Wait,” I cried, “and I will pay them both out! What right had they, after what I said, to try and torture a lie out of you? Don’t fear for the convent, child. I pledge my word you shall have a husband and fifty children, nun or no nun.”
“I want no husband,” she answered, blushing and clinging to me, “and no lover but you.” ”

“ Eh bien! la voix du peuple est la voix de Dieu! So they say; only, unfortunately, here the Lazzari were the crack in it. It was a pretty Naples I had come to.
One afternoon, while looking out of the window, I saw a magnificent equipage cross the square, and, turning the corner towards the palace, disappear. I had been waiting during these long days for some such vision, the nature of which now, if, indeed, the plaudits of the loafers had not confirmed it in my mind, was established in the glimpse of a bold, beautiful face which I obtained in its passing. ”