Bernard Capes

“ She did not ask herself by what miracle she was to escape her doom. She felt only that to see him again, to rest upon his heart, were to solve all difficulties.
And so the year sped on. To Fanchette she betrayed no more of herself; only her basil was her only friend; and she would speak softly to it, and with pretty wooings ask it to blossom soon—very soon now, lest its tardiness should prove their undoing. It was odd and pitiful how she had come to regard this plant as the sure symbol of their destiny. ”

“ On the instant there came into this voiceless paradise the figures of a man and a stunted boy. The man carried a lute or mandolin slung over his shoulder; the boy, large-headed and large-hatted like a gnome, followed importantly in the other’s footsteps.
“It is the enchanted garden of Hesperus,” said Tiretta, pausing on the threshold. He lowered his voice instinctively, as if he had broken unexpectedly into some woodland shrine of the gods; then went a soft step or two and paused again.
“It is a very good plantation,” said Bissy, tolerant and superior. ”

“ His voice was quite wrung and broken.
“I would have you,” said Joseph, “atone, in the only way you can, the wrong you have done, not to me but to her.”
“I am to go—never to see her again—to leave her believing me faithless?”
“Better a faithless lover than a faithless wife. So only can you heal the wound you have inflicted. For her sake, Tiretta.”
“Why do you not call in your guards, and have me silenced for ever? I will make no resistance.”
“Because I am human, though a prince, Tiretta.” ”

“ I do not propose to you to do more than pretend.”
He looked stupefied: “I believe you are my true friend indeed,” he stammered; and she laughed, and snapped her fingers in his face, and left him feeling as if he had suddenly pulled up on the brink of an abyss.
A pretended intrigue! The very thought was profanation to his love—an outrage and a shame. But it embodied a quasi-revelation which was even more ashaming. Fanchette knew; his affectation of artless misunderstanding of her hints and innuendoes was exposed, and finally, for the guilty sham it was. ”

“ His eyes were suddenly burning; his lips set grim as judgment. “I have some reason, perhaps, to brood over my injuries,” he said. “They have known no salve, your Highness will understand, since, for friendship’s sake, I essayed a thankless task.”
He was again turning to go, and again she delayed him.
“Monsieur, I entreat you. A friend, I know, may act for a friend against his better inclination, and only because he is a friend. I do not doubt the independence of your mind or the honour of your principles.”
Tiretta bowed stiffly, but in silence. ”

“ As she went on, a spirit of exhilaration rose to possess her, quite alone and at liberty as she was. State and observance seemed unreal things; there was not a soul abroad to remind her of them; she and nature were in one confidence together, as if, like old companions long mistily estranged, they were as mistily reunited.
Involuntarily, it seemed, her steps took her towards the spot associated with an incident of yesterday. There was a woven arbour near by the lily-pond, and her thoughts settled there, as in a hermitage sweet for meditation. ”

“ Yet there seemed a motive behind her ill-manners, too.
“I have sung badly,” said Tiretta good-humouredly. “I admit it.”
“Eh bien!” said madame; “it does not matter in the least. You have done your best, and there is an end of it.”
She got up almost immediately, having delivered herself, though with a hurried manner, as if she doubted having gone too far, and, saying she had an appointment to keep and would be back in a minute, waddled out of the room.
“To sleep,” whispered Isabella. “She will say to herself it is only to shut her eyes for a moment; but it will be an hour.” ”

“ If she coquetted at all, it was more with women than with men; yet she was equally natural with both. As sweet a princess as Perdita—as sweet a milkmaid she would have been, had fortune deposed her. Impressionable, poor child—it was a pity only that nature, not sparing her the softest of hearts, should have done so little to protect its own rich achievement from harm. But nature, bent only on relentless propagation, designs these triumphant things as lures.
Isabella, during all her young life, had endeared herself with whomsoever she had visited. ”

“ She was not gone for a day, a week, a month; she was gone, so far as their intimacy was concerned, for ever. Henceforth her august and his obscure destinies separated, to flow continually wider apart; no road of his conceivably led to Parma, where she was established not again to return.
Not to return! He had to grip himself to realise that stupendous fact, to get at last on terms with the conscience he had so long eluded. And then, flowing, flowing in from that outer darkness to which it had been relegated, came the deadly spirit of guilt and remorse ”

“ She had no wish, for herself or her lover, to rise to Tiretta’s level; she would have liked dearly to pull him down to theirs. Wherefore, in the prosecution of that amiable design, she had been quite ready to lend herself a subtle instrument to the ruin of that rival favourite. She would even, if provoked to it, have given her body to the task, as she had her soul. To hate and to seduce, to seduce because she hated, to risk loving because she had seduced—that was something her mental attitude. It was the passionist French view, and Fanchette was excessively French. ”

“ The real tragedy of separation is not for the banished lover; it is for the desolate home-keeper, who knows no distractions of change and movement to solace her aching heart. He, at least, has his freedom, his new interests; she, none but the old, grown now so flat and unprofitable since the glorifying light was once flashed upon them and withdrawn. How darker than darkness looks a room when the lamp is blown out ”

“ For the first time some emotion showed itself in Joseph’s face. He started, as if he would rise; but leaned back again, resolute to control himself.
“You may question my honour, sir,” said Tiretta. “In the name of God, leave hers unsullied by a thought.”
Steadfastly, for some moments, the two regarded one another; then Joseph rose from his chair, and, walking to a window, stood looking out upon an inner court of the palace which it commanded. Presently, without turning, he spoke:
“You are very severe on princes, my friend; yet it seems they can be guileless in their trusts.” ”

“ It was not their guilt which was the poignant thing; it was the irreparable loss it had entailed on humanity. One did not condemn a viper because it achieved its nature as much in biting the heel of a saint as of a sinner. That all-sweet absence of the spirit of revenge; that utter absorption in the effects of the deed and noble contempt for its perpetrators, should have been felt by base minds as more crushing than any retaliation. Perhaps it was. Neither la Coque nor Mademoiselle Becquet was to be found at Colorno in these days.
And the mortal body of her tragedy? ”

“ He bowed elaborately over the hand which Isabella gave him, and kissed it as if he were negotiating an oyster.
“I greet your Highness,” he said, “on behalf of the Court, myself, and, above all, his Excellency, your father, who, I rejoice to inform you, is very well.”
“And my maman, monseigneur?” asked Isabella, her eyes full and shining.
“She writes in the best of spirits,” said du Tillot: “like one who finds in the promised fruition of her hopes a glad new lease of life.” He was a kind old man. ”

“ My answer to that is that his Highness the Archduke might choose a finer advocate to sound his praises, but never one more earnest or convinced.”
She looked down, drawing in the dust with the point of her little shoe.
“I have always heard of him as a very grave and virtuous prince,” she murmured.
“Believe it true, I beg you,” said Tiretta. “His ideals are the ideals of a conscientious ruler and a noble gentleman. He has wisdom beyond his years, but free of pedantry, most sweet and natural affections, a fine presence, and a will which, if strong, is neither arrogant nor obstinate.” ”

“ So it often is that to die is to live for the first time as one’s true self, even in the hearts of those who cherished us.
Ah, death, who clears the vision; in whom all revealed truths corradiate—give us back the child, the friend, the lover, whose worth we never really estimated until you opened our eyes to all that it had meant to us. ”

“ Isabella, with an exclamation of horror, shrunk back.
“Those are not oranges, my friend,” said Tiretta.
He pointed to a row of little shrubs or herbs, set in earthenware jars against a sunny wall. They were green and bushy, and the vessels were of many colours, fancifully designed and decorated.
“They are sweet basil, or basil-thyme, master,” said Aquaviva—“a common stock, until enriched by good feeding. It is the way of the world all over. It is blood which makes the quality—meat-juice, and plenty of it. ”

“ It is most natural to picture the monarchs and Infantes of Spain in trunk-hose and with bristling “stiletto” beards—fierce, haughty tyrants, of a piece with the colour and fury of their times. You must picture Don Philip, however, under a very different aspect. He sits at the moment at a table in his private cabinet at Parma, a rather solemn-looking macaroni of thirty-eight, writing, like Buffon, in lace ruffles with a gold pen, and appearing more concerned over the right balance of his toupet than over the equilibrium of the European concert. ”

“ The girl obeyed, caught her breath with a start, and lowered her lids.
“Look at me, I say.”
Abject already in that revelation, the maid, half-whimpering, again essayed to lift her hang-dog eyes, and, in the very struggle to brazen out her falsehood, collapsed and burst into tears.
“Liar!” said Isabella softly. She was wrought beyond her gentle self: the wanton wickedness of the slander—never for one moment believed else by her incorruptible heart—had transformed her from a Hebe into a Megaera. “Are you not a liar?” ”

“ She failed, for all her effort, to meet the inquisition of the true grief-stricken eyes.
“Fanchette!”
“O, we know how gossip is to be discounted. For myself, at least, I never took him seriously.”
“In what?”
“It is only natural to propitiate the maid if you would come at the mistress.”
“Did he make love to you?”
“O, that is too definite a term! He said enough to put me on my guard against him—that is all.”
“You need not have been so scrupulous. He is ever courteous and considerate—attentions that woman in her vanity is always too ready to accept as single to herself.” ”

“ In short the duke only took means according to his lights to forget his trouble; and what should we all do, under like circumstances, but so study to fight the brooding demon of morbidity? Did he find a wholesome diversion in discussing with la Coque the details of a mourning coat, the braided sorrow of its cuffs, the sad expressive disposition of its buttons, why grudge him that comfort simply because we ourselves could see none in it? If a man can find solace for his grief in cat’s-cradle, by all means let him play with strings. ”

“ Help a nerveless subject to decision, help a diffident lover to his mistress, but never thereafter imply to either of them that he was once other than the masterful hero your assistance made him.
Not that Bissy had been of much assistance to our hero on a certain occasion. Only things had altered since then; the old atmosphere of bitterness had sweetened to a strange new flavour.
Seeing the boy, with swollen lids and puckered face, trying to repress his sobs, remorse gripped Tiretta. That passion was always his besetting weakness. ”

“ She ceased crying, and, raising her head a little, dared a breathless retort:
“Not in judgment, but in sympathy, mademoiselle, since in imitating our betters we feel with them.”
“What is that you say?”
“No one should know better than your Highness how love intoxicates our reason.”
Isabella gazed at the speaker with eyes in which the indignation was slowly giving place to distress.
“Yes,” she said low.
“An intrigue is an intrigue,” said Fanchette, growing bolder as the other wavered. “If it is wrong, we look to high example to make it shameful to us. ”

“ Let his Highness test him and believe. Joseph smiled. Too much protest, too many words.
“I mistrust all excess—even of fidelity,” he said.
“Your Highness begins, your Highness has said it,” cried Tiretta, “where ordinarily old age is content to end—in the last wisdom of simplicity. Be tolerant of us commoner minds, who, being little, cannot afford, like your Highness, to do without some ostentation, even in speech. An emperor can dress plain, can dismiss his escort, can sit in silence self-contained, and remain an emperor. ”

“ For weakness may be lovable, while strength is only admirable; and a woman defrauded in her helpful instinct is a woman deprived of her essential meaning.
If I have made it appear that Tiretta was a masterful character, I have sketched his portrait awry, and must revise it. He was, in truth, in many ways an entirely weak creature, impressionable, emotional, and lacking the first quality of decision. One sees how he had been persuaded to dance attendance on Fortune, lingering on in her ante-room in the vain hopes of that summons to her presence which a more resolute soul would have enforced. ”

“ But the laugh had in reality spoken no more than a tickle of that humour which accepts its own failures whimsically.
“Stuff and nonsense!” cried the marquise. “You were ready enough with your definitions when you wanted to contradict monsieur. But one can no more produce reason from temper than grapes from a thistle or music from that tree.”
“Cannot one?” said Tiretta, hastily interposing with a droll look. ”