Henry Harland

“ Wood itself, I dare say, must have vibrated a little at that. In the throne-room I was suddenly caught up and whisked away, back to a rainy afternoon at Craford; and I walked beside you on the cliffs, and heard your voice, and rejoiced in the sense of your nearness to me, and in your adorable beauty, as you breasted the wind, with the sea and the sky for a background. (Do you remember? Do you remember how keen and sweet the air was, with the scent of the wild thyme? and how the sand-martins circled round us?) ”

“ But the pin-point grew bigger, the hosannas louder; the bird was descending.
"Literally it is music coming down upon us from heaven," she said.
"Yes—but when it reaches us, it will stop, we shall lose it," said Anthony. "It is music too ethereal to survive the contact of this gross planet."
Singing, singing, the bird sank, with folded wings; and sure enough, the very instant he touched the earth, his song stopped short—a bubble pricked, a light extinguished.
"He has come to drink and bathe," said Susanna. ”

“ She is strong as a perfect young animal is strong. Yet she is fine. She is fine as only, of all created beings, a fine woman can be fine—a woman delicate, sensitive, high-bred, fine in herself, and with all her belongings fine."
"Life," said Adrian, "is a thing a man should come by honestly; a thing the possession of which a man should justify; a thing a man should earn."
"Some favoured individuals, I have heard, inherit it from their forebears," said Anthony, as one loth to dogmatise, on the tone of a mere suggestion. ”

“ The graver underglow in Susanna's eyes eclipsed, for an instant, their dancing surface lights.
"They were a race of poets," she said regretfully, "before they learned how to read and write. But now, with the introduction of popular education,"—she shook her head,—"the poetry is dying out."
"Ah," said Anthony, with a meaning flourish of his stick, "there it is. The poetic spirit always dies at the advance of that ghastly fetich." Then he spoke sententiously. "Popular education is a contrivance of the devil, whereby he looks to extinguish every last saving grace from the life of the populace. ”

“ Then gradually, as you come nearer, the cloud changes, crystallises; and Sampaolo is like a great wonderful carving, a great wonderful carved jewel, a cameo cut on the sea, with a sort of aureole about it, an opalescence of haze and sunshine. Nearer still, its aspect is almost terrible, a scene of breath-taking precipices, spire-like mountains, wild black gorges, ravines; but, to humanise it, you can count at least twenty villages, villages clinging to every hillside, perched on almost every hill-top, each with its group of cypresses, like sentinels, and its campanile. ”

“ Nothing human is perfect that does not exhibit somewhere a fine inconsequence. Thus I exhibit mine. I make music from a high sense of duty, to enrich the world; but at the same time I make it because I can't help making it. I make it as the bee makes honey, as the Jew makes money, spontaneously, inevitably. It is my nature to,—just as it 's the nature of fire to burn, and of dairy-maids to churn. It is the inherent, ineradicable impulse of my bounteous soul."
"You told me in so many words that Friday was unlucky," said Anthony.
"Well, and so it is," said Adrian. ”

“ I could imagine myself loving Sampaolo—if you were here. In nine days—nine days! And to-morrow it will be only eight days, and the day after to-morrow only seven. Only do I say? I count in that fashion to keep my courage up. Nine days! Why can't those nine eternities be annihilated from the calendar? Why does n't some kind person kill me, and then call me back to life in nine days? Oh, it was cruel of you, cruel, cruel."
Susanna looked out of her window, across the dark bay, to where the electric lamps along the Riva threw wavering fronds of light upon the water. ”

“ You ask me to be your wife. But if I consent, you give up your only chance of regaining your Italian patrimony—do you not? But a man should at least know what he is giving up. You should know what your patrimony consists of. You should know, as the saying is, what you 'stand to lose.' Therefore you must go to Sampaolo, and see it with your own eyes. Isola Nobile, Castel San Guido, the Palazzo Rosso, Villa Formosa—you must see them all, with their gardens and their pictures and their treasures. ”

“ Later that afternoon, Adrian having gone alone for his donkey-ride in the country (more power to the back of the donkey!) , Anthony was seated by the open window of his bedroom, in a state of deep depression. All at once, between the two promontories that form the entrance to the bay, the Capo del Papa and the Capo del Turco, appeared, heading for Vallanza, a white steamer, clearly, from its size and lines, a yacht—a very bright and gay object to look upon, as it gleamed in the sun and crisped the blue waters. ”

“ My cousin is the embodiment of the anti-tradition. You say—marry her. That is like inviting the Pope to ally himself with the Antipope."
"No, no," contended Susanna, arresting her sunshade in the midst of an intricate vermiculation. "For the Antipope must be in wilful personal rebellion; while your cousin is what she is, quite independently of her own will—perhaps in spite of it. Imagine me, for instance, in her place—me," she smiled, "the sole legitimist in Sampaolo. What could I do? I find myself in possession of stolen goods. ”

“ In the spring the valleys of Sampaolo are pink with blossoming peach-trees and almond-trees, where they are not scarlet with pomegranates. Basil, rosemary, white heather, you can pluck where you will. And everywhere that they can find a footing, oleanders grow, the big double red ones, great trees of them, such wonder-worlds of colour, such fountains of perfume. The birds of Sampaolo never cease their singing—they sing as joyously in December as in June. And the nightingales of Sampaolo sing all day, as well as all night. ”

“ And now, as Anthony, heading for the Wetherleigh-wards exit of the park, approached the brook, to cross it,—"Sh, sh—please, please,"—a whisper stopped him.
There by the bank, under the tall pines, where sun and shadow chequered the russet carpet of pine-needles, there, white-robed, sat Susanna: white-robed, hatless, gloveless. She was waving her hand, softly, in a gesture invocative of caution; but her eyes smiled a welcome to him.
Anthony halted, waited,—his heart, I think, high-bearing.
"It is a blue tit," she explained, under her breath, eagerly. "The rarest bird that ever comes. ”

“ The wind blows them away—away, away, and far away, over the bright blue sea. Every afternoon we get a wind, sweeping in from the north. Sometimes it is only a venticello, sometimes a temporale, sometimes an orogano terribile, but it is always sufficient to blow away the mosquitoes and the bandits. Pia told me so. Sweet Pia."
"Humph," said Anthony.
"Humph, by all means," Adrian hastened to agree. "I have a sort of humphy feeling myself—a sort of unsatisfied yearning, that is scarcely akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain. ”

“ But she and I and all of us must accept the situation as we find it. She must not think of becoming a nun.' You see, he has good sense as well as good feeling. That is what I have always told you myself—we must accept the situation as we find it. There's no use trying to open up the past."
"H'm," said Susanna, on a key of doubt.
"And then, with my heart in the business, for I had seen that he was of the right stuff, then I proposed a marriage," said the Commendatore. "I put it to him as strongly as I could. I painted the advantages in vivid colours. But it was no good. He cannot marry you. ”

“ You are the legitimate Conte di Sampaolo. You are entitled to your own."
"My dear Father!" Anthony cried out, almost writhing. "It is a matter, I tell you, that I cannot even discuss. Accept them! And allow an inexperienced young girl, who can't possibly understand the consequences of her action, on a quixotic impulse, to beggar herself for me, to give up everything, to retire from the world and die by slow inches in a convent! The thing is too monstrous. A man could never hold up his head again." ”

“ She looked at him quite fearlessly now, with eyes that pretended to forget they had ever been complaisant.
"The Count of Sampaolo," she argued calmly, "is not free to marry whom he will. He has his inheritance to regain, his mission to fulfil. I will never allow myself to be made an obstacle to that. He must marry no one but his cousin. I will never stand between him and her—between him and what is equally his interest and his duty."
But Anthony, too, was getting himself in hand. ”

“ Susanna said at last, with feeling.
"Beautiful," emphatically chimed in Protestant Miss Sandus.
"Stand still, true poet that you are,—I know you, let me try and name you," laughed Anthony, from the hearth-rug.
"Chrysostom—he should be named Chrysostom," said Miss Sandus.
"The world is a garden of beautiful ideas," was Adrian's modest acceptance of these tributes. "One only has to cull them. But now"—he rose—"I must toddle home. Are you going my way?" he inquired of Anthony. ”

“ One set commanded the Piazza, with its grey old church (the Cathedral of St. Paul and St. Guy) , its detached campanile, its big central fountain, and, occupying the entire eastern side, the crumbling frescoed front of the Palazzo Rosso. The other set looked across the Riva, and its double row of palms, out upon the bay, with its anchored ships, its fishing-boats, its encircling olive-covered hills, dotted high and low by villages and villas, and its embosomed Islets, Isola Nobile, Isola Fratello, Isola Sorella, the whole wide prospect glowing in the sun. ”

“ Susanna premonished him, shaking her head.
"I adore terribly long stories," he declared. "And have we not before us the whole of future time?"
"Sampaolo came to be an Island of the Distressed," said she, "because, some half-century ago, the Sampaolesi got infected with an idea that was then a kind of epidemic—the idea of Italian unity. So they had a revolution, overthrew their legitimate sovereign, gave up their Independence, and united themselves to the 'unholy and unhappy State' which has since assumed the name of the Kingdom of Italy." ”

“ Anthony, with some grimness, returned. "I am content to sit in my place, and watch the pantomime. You long to get upon the stage. Your unassuageable craving to write a song is, in its essence, just an unassuageable craving to make yourself an object of attention. And that's the whole truth about you artists. I recollect your telling me that Friday was unlucky."
"Oh, how superficial you are," Adrian plaintively protested. "A man like me, you should understand, is meant for the world—for the world's delight, for mankind's wonder. ”

“ In a ball-dress," he scoffed, and pointed a finger at Susanna's snowy confection of tulle and satin and silver embroidery, all a-shimmer in the artificial moonlight of the electric lamps, against the background of southern garden,—the outlines and masses, dim and mysterious in the night, of palms and cypresses, of slender eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, magnolias, of orange-trees, where the oranges hung, amid the dark foliage, like dull-burning lanterns. ”

“ A diligent sightseer should be able to see Sampaolo pretty thoroughly in a week."
"A week," he calculated, "and I suppose one must allow at least another week for getting there and back. So you exile me for a fortnight?"
His tone and his eyes pleaded with her.
"A fortnight is not much," said she, lightly.
"No," he gloomily acquiesced. "It is only fourteen lifetimes to a man who happens to be in love."
"Men are reputed to be stronger than women," she reproached him, with a look. "If a mere woman can stand a fortnight——!"
Anthony gasped—and sprang towards her. ”

“ Susanna instructed him. "Now see how you leave me out of your Scandinavian legend. 'Consider the alternative,' said you. 'He throws over his Englishwoman, and he becomes—' Well, you said, 'Master of a noble estate.' But a really gallant person might have said, 'Husband of a perfectly entrancing Italian woman.'"
She pulled a little face.
"Ha," laughed the Commendatore, briefly. "You must have your joke."
And his hand instinctively made for his moustaches. "Well, I am sorry.
I can never hope to find you a better husband."
"You need never try," said Susanna. "He will do." ”