Francesca Alexander

“ The day came at last,—a soft beautiful day of the late autumn, with plenty of flowers still in blossom to ornament the table, and the air still warm enough to make open windows pleasant. We had a very pretty simple wedding at S. Lorenzo, and then went back to the house, where we found Ida up and sitting in the easy chair, which she had not occupied for a long time. She was so excited and interested that a slight colour had come back into her face, and she looked as well as ever, and prettier than ever. ”

“ Now, Ida was so very young that there seemed nothing very dreadful in the idea of waiting, but her lover was a great deal too ardent for that. His proposal was—and he would hear of nothing else—that they should be married immediately by a religious marriage, leaving the civil marriage—the only one now legal—until another time, when his career in the army should be finished. The poor child knew nothing of civil and religious marriages, but she was a little frightened at the idea that her marriage would be a secret from the whole world ”

“ One of the little orphans had been adopted into a childless family, another had gone to live in the country with his maternal grandmother. The prettiest and sweetest of them all, little Silvio, had died, to the great sorrow of all the family, at the time when Ida was at Viareggio; so that now only Luisa was left at home. The girl’s brother, Telemaco, had obtained some sort of government employment in a distant part of the country, so that he too was gone. And only the old people, and Luisa and Filomena, would be left to take care of Ida after Giulia should be married. ”

“ She still loved L——, but she no longer trusted him, though she always tried to excuse his conduct in speaking of him; but I do not know if there be anything in the world more unhappy than love without trust. He had been ordered to Sicily, to fight the brigands, and they were not likely to meet again for many months. I did not quite know what to make of this letter: it was very fervent in its expressions of affection, full of desperate sorrow for the long and inevitable separation. But there was not a word in it about marriage. ”

“ I have done now with all the worldly part of my Ida’s story: what remains will be only the account of her most wonderful and glorious passage into the other world, and of the singular and almost visible help which it pleased the Lord to give her in her long illness. ”

“ I [Pg 57] said, “is no more than natural; I could not help it if I would.” “And lately,” she continued, “I have begun to be a little afraid that you may like me too much!” “Dear Ida, what do you mean?” “It is a great comfort to me,” she said, “to have you with me; but sometimes I am afraid that if I should die, you might grieve about it, and in that case I would rather that you should not come so often; I could not bear the idea of being a cause of sorrow to you. Now, I want you to promise that if I die, you will not be unhappy about me.” ”

“ There was another reason, stronger yet. The doctor had forbidden Giulia to sleep in the same room with Ida, and she and little Luisa had been obliged to return into the dark closet where they had slept before. Giulia was looking poorly, and had a cough, and seemed very much as Ida had been a year ago; and we all wished that she might change scene and climate before it was too late. Still we all shrank from laying on Ida, in her last days, this farther burden of separation from her dearly loved, only sister. ”

“ Before I left Florence, however, I had begun to feel pretty sure that Ida’s mysterious illness came of her grief for L——. One day I said to her, “Ida, tell me if I have guessed rightly: you have suffered more about L—— than you have been willing to tell.” And she answered, “If I have, I have never troubled any one else about it.”
A few days after I left her, L—— made his long promised visit to Florence. He seemed troubled at the change in Ida, and met her at first very kindly. He saw her, however, only once, and then left her, saying that he would come again the next day. ”

“ I think she obeyed literally the gospel precept, to be “like men waiting for their Lord.” The poor little room and its dying inmate presented always a strangely festive appearance, as if they were prepared for the soon expected arrival of one greatly loved and longed for.
The window was always opened at the foot of the bed,—for light and air she would have, and her dress and the linen of her bed were always as neat and clean as possible, to the credit of her mother be it spoken, who did the washing herself, with the help of her good little servant-maid Filomena. ”

“ I can never be well, really: but still, let it [Pg 47] be as the Lord will.” “Have courage, Ida,” said Giulia; and her mother, “Do not be afraid, my child.” “I am not afraid,” she answered. “I think,” I said, “that God gives you courage always.” “Yes, yes,” she answered, with a very bright smile: “blessed are His words!”—and the poor mother went out of the room. Then Ida looked earnestly into my face and said, “There are tears in your eyes, but there are none in mine.” I asked her if she wished to die. ”

“ The lady appeared troubled, and answered her very sadly, “You must know that L—— is in a very difficult position; he has grave duties to perform.” “What duties?” asked Giulia, who could not imagine that any duty could be greater than his duty to her sister. And the lady answered, yet more sadly than before, that he was the father of two children. The horror of the innocent open-hearted Giulia is more easily imagined than described. Trembling, she asked of the children’s mother, and learned that she was another victim, even more unfortunate than Ida. ”

“ One day a little girl brought her an olive branch, as she said, to remind her of the one which the dove brought to Noah in the ark: probably the child did not know how her olive branch came, like the dove’s, as a token of deliverance close at hand; but Ida understood the significance of the present, and had the olive branch placed over her [Pg 61] Madonna, where it seemed to be a great comfort to her, and it stayed there until she died. Whenever the room was dusted she used to say, “Be careful and do not hurt my olive branch!” ”

“ Meanwhile, L—— seems to have felt his old affection for her, such as it was, revive, at the idea of losing her altogether; and he continued to write her passionate and imploring letters. Her answers were very gentle and patient, written so as to spare his feelings as much as possible, but they were very decided. She could never belong to him now—he must not think of that any more—but she entreated him to make what reparation he could to the poor Neapolitan, and to give her the happiness, before they parted, of knowing that he had done right. ”

“ And, during these years of unanswered petitioning, I have become more and more convinced that the wholesomest antagonism to whatever is dangerous in the temper, or foolish in the extravagance, of modern Fiction, would be found in sometimes substituting for the artfully-combined improbability, the careful record of providentially ordered Fact. ”

“ She saw the poor neighbours besides, but to her they were all people to be loved, and pitied, and sympathised with. Whatever there was, good, in any of them, she found it out, and ignored everything else. It was a peculiarity of my Ida, that all the people with whom she was intimately acquainted were, in some way or other, “very remarkable.” She never admitted that they had any faults. One old woman whose temper was so fearful that nobody could live with her, was “a good old woman, but a little nervous. ”

“ The lives we need to have written for us are of the people whom the world has not thought of,—far less heard of,—who are yet doing the most of its work, and of whom we may learn how it can best be done. ”

“ Ida was a little seamstress, and she was then only beginning to earn money. Thirty centimes a day [1] was what she gained when she worked for a shop, and for this she used to sit at the sewing machine until past midnight. [Pg 10] Sometimes she used to sew for ladies at their houses, and then she earned a franc a day or more.
Her parents allowed her to keep all her own earnings, that she might clothe herself; but there was always something that she wanted for father, or mother, or Giulia, or the little orphans, more than anything that she wanted for herself ”

“ We both spoke about them—Giulia, I rather think, pretty freely—to Ida. She had resolution enough, when right and wrong were concerned; and without saying anything to Giulia she went to the post-office, and inquired of the people employed there, if her lover were really in the habit of sending money to Naples, where his sister-in-law lived, and to whom. A record is always kept at the post-office of all the money that comes and goes, so that it was easy to ascertain the truth. And she found that he frequently sent money to a woman in Naples, bearing the same family name as himself. ”

“ But generally she was engaged in saving money, a few centimes at a time, to buy a present for somebody, which was a great secret, confided to me under promise of silence. One centime a day she always laid by for “the poor.” “It is very little,” she said, “but I save it up until Sunday, and it is enough to buy a piece of bread for an old blind man, who always comes to us for his breakfast on Sunday morning.”
[Pg 11]
When the time came for Giulia to pass her examination, Ida came to my room every day, and sometimes twice a day, to tell me what progress she was making. ”

“ By this time Ida had become so ill that she was never able to lie down, but had to sit up day and night upright in her bed, supported by pillows, and her cough allowed her to sleep but very little. The lady was much troubled to see her in this state, and to comfort her, she told her that it was necessary to suffer much in this world if one would attain to happiness in the other. ”

“ When she was too tired and weak for her sewing, or her books of devotion, she used to lie and look at these flowers. Edwige (whom every one knows, who knows me, and of whom it is enough to say that she is a good and pious widow who lives in the country, and who was very fond of Ida) used to bring down continually such things as she liked from the country,—long streamers of ivy, and branches of winter roses and laurustinus, [Pg 49] and black and orange-coloured berries from the hedges,—and these were a continual amusement to her. ”

“ For a minute at the door I turned back, and wiped away the tears, that I might take one more look at the beautiful face smiling among the flowers; then I passed on, and my long, happy attendance in [Pg 75] that chamber was over. That night, when she was carried away, the artist who had long wished to paint her portrait followed her to S. Caterina, where all the dead of Florence are laid for one night, and went in and drew her likeness by lamplight. All the servants employed about the establishment gathered about her, wondering at her beauty. ”

“ Gradually he began to neglect his work, his language and behaviour were agitated and unlike his usual self, he wandered much about without an object,—and one day the report of a pistol was heard in his room, and that was the last! The grandparents had taken home all the poor little orphans, and it was to assist in supporting them that Giulia wished to be a teacher. ”

“ The family, being poor, were obliged to let all their good [Pg 29] rooms, and to occupy all the dark and inconvenient ones themselves; so that Ida and Giulia and their little niece Luisa slept all together in what was really nothing more than a dark closet. He thought also that she had injured herself by drawing water for her mother, who took in washing. So Giulia, out of her small earnings, hired a woman to come every day and draw the water, and the poet received notice to leave his room at the beginning of the next month. ”

“ The next day when I went there Giulia was gone, and Ida was quite weak and tired. She was never well enough to sit up again, and she faded away very slowly. The second day a letter came from Giulia, written almost in the first hour of her arrival in Rome, full of overflowing affection. Ida shed some tears at this, but not many; and she answered it with her own hand, weak as she was. One day, soon after this, as I was sitting beside Ida, she asked her mother to leave us alone for a few minutes, as she wished to speak to me. “Come a little nearer,” she said, when we were alone ”

“ One earnest word only I have to add here, for the reader’s sake,—let it be noted with thankful reverence that this is the story of a Catholic girl written by a Protestant one, yet the two of them so united in the Truth of the Christian Faith, and in the joy of its Love, that they are absolutely unconscious of any difference in the forms or letter of their religion. ”

“ But it pleased the Lord that the worst should not happen to our Ida. L—— was called away from Florence at a few hours’ notice, to join his regiment, on the very day before the one fixed for the marriage. The government was just then making its preparations for the taking of Rome. What she suffered from this separation is not to be told, yet I feel that it was a providence to save her from far greater evil. When we came back to Florence in September I found Ida quite changed in appearance, but patient and resigned as she always was—willing, as she said, to leave all in the Lord’s hand. ”

“ A man who had lodged with them for some time had just then left them; and a military officer had taken his room. I remember still the day when Ida first spoke to me of this man, and seemed pleased that her mother had found a new lodger instead of the old one. Oh, if I could only have warned her against him then!
But, as I have said, Ida seemed to be fading, and I felt pretty anxious about her. We were going up to the mountains about that time, and when we parted she said, “Perhaps you will not find me when you [Pg 13] come back; I feel as if I should not live very long.” ”