Valeria

“ Enter Valeria, concealed under a long black stole, followed by Lucia and two female Attendants, who remain at the bottom of the stage whilst she comes forward.
CONJUROR.
Approach, great dame.
VALERIA.
Yes, in misfortunes so;
That is my eminence: and unto thee
I come, an anxious suitor, if that truly
Th' unseen mysterious powers with whom thou deal'st,
To human weal and woe alliance bear,
And may unto the care-rack'd mind foreshew
The path of awful fate that lies before it. ”

“ Valeria had never known what passionate feeling meant till she gave her friendship to Bothwell Grahame. She had never thrilled at a man's voice, or listened for a man's footstep, till she began to start at his voice and listen for his tread. The fatal love came upon her like a fever, struck her down in the strength of her proud womanhood, made her oblivious of duty, blind to honour, mastered her like a demoniac possession, and from a spotless wife she became all at once a hypocrite and an intriguer. ”

“ The cry of the Empress as the little serpent stung her cheek brought a swarm of attendants and slaves into the room, among them black Juba and the officer of the guard who was responsible for the Empress' safety. Valeria had fainted and lay pale as ashes on her couch, a crimson stream flowing from her cheek.
"Dear heart!" exclaimed Juba, with an ostentatious exhibition of well-feigned grief, "let her inhale this fragrant elixir. It is a potent restorative in such deadly faints," and she attempted to complete her desperate crime by thrusting the poisonous perfume under Valeria's nostrils. ”

“ Flora, too, though far less consciously than Valeria, had sometimes glimpsed the sterility of her days.
“Lucilla, you know where to seek counsel, I believe,” said Canon Morchard gravely. “I make all due allowance for your natural, loving impulse towards our poor Valeria—all due allowance. If your heart bleeds for her, how much more does not mine? But there are times when we must do violence to our natural feelings and I believe that some such necessity is upon you now. Deny yourself, my daughter, and He will bless the sacrifice both to you and to our dear one far away.” ”

“ Hadria received this letter from the postman when she was coming out of Dodge’s cottage.
It threw her into a conflict of strong and painful feeling: foreboding, heart-sickness, a longing so strong to see her friends that it seemed as if she must pack up instantly and go to them, and through it all, a sense of loneliness that was almost unbearable. How she envied Valeria! To love with her whole heart, without a shadow of doubt; to have that element of warmth in her life which could never fail her, like sunshine to the earth. ”

“ Valeria gathered a spray, and nodded slowly.
“I don’t want to allow emotion to get the better of me, Valeria. I don’t want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I dread the accumulation of emotion—emotion that has never had a good explosive utterance. One has to be so discreet in these Italian gardens; no one shouts or says ‘damn.’”
“Ah! you naturally feel out of your element.”
Hadria laughed. “It’s all very well to take that superior tone. You don’t reside on an ordnance map.”
There was a pause. Miss Du Prel seemed lost in thought. ”

“ Lady Valeria had her good days and her bad days; and on the bad days she was sunk in an abyss of despair, from which not even some great success in her racing speculations could rouse her. It was in one of these fits of despondency that Sir George Varney made his second proposal of marriage. ”

“ How could she ever again believe in that love, after she had heard the history of his passion for another, after she had read of that wild infatuation in his own hand, after she had seen the woman he had thus loved and thus addressed—a woman to win and hold the love of men, a woman whose face had that subtle charm of supreme refinement and distinction which is far above the peach-bloom tints and perfect lines of stereotyped beauty? In Valeria the broken-hearted girl acknowledged a siren before whose fascinations the wisest man might be as a fool. ”

“ Weariness, as usual, followed fast on the heels of satiety, to be succeeded by irritation, discontent, and dislike; then came rude words, angry gestures, and overt aggression from the man, met by the woman with trifling provocations, mute defiance, and sullen scorn. To love another, too, so hopelessly and so dearly, made Valeria’s lot even more difficult to bear, rendering her fretful, intolerant, and inaccessible to all efforts at reconciliation. ”

“ This queenly presence was the young and lovely Empress Valeria, the daughter of Diocletian and Prisca, and wife of the co-Emperor, Galerius Cæsar. The object of envy of all the women of Borne, she lived to become within a few short years the object of their profoundest commiseration. Of her even the unsympathetic Gibbon remarks that "her melancholy adventures might furnish a very singular subject for tragedy." ”

“ But these hopes, to use again the language of Gibbon, "were soon succeeded by horror and astonishment, and the bloody execution which stained the palace of Nicomedia sufficiently convinced her that the throne of Maximin was filled by a tyrant more inhuman than himself. Valeria consulted her safety by hasty flight, and, still accompanied by her mother Prisca, they wandered above fifteen months through the provinces in the disguise of plebeian habits. ”

“ Granted that a little salve to one’s battered and scarified self-love was soft and grateful, what did that prove of the woman who welcomed it, beyond a human craving to keep the inner picture of herself as bright and fine as might be? The man who, out of contempt or irreverence, set a bait for the universal appetite proved himself, rather than his intended victim, of meagre quality. Valeria complimented him generously by supposing him sincere. ”

“ Valeria woke up with a start, and responded to Hubert’s greeting in an erratic fashion, replying tragically, to a casual enquiry as to her health, that she had been frightfully ill.
“I thought I was dying. But one never dies,” she added in a disgusted tone, whereat Hadria heartlessly laughed, and hurried the visitor upstairs to help her to unpack.
“Valeria,” said Mrs. Temperley, while that lady was confusedly trying to disentangle hat and hair, hat-pin and head, without involving the entire system in a common ruin—“Valeria, we are not a remarkable people at Craddock Dene. ”

“ Thereafter his accomplishment rusted—to the relief of the management—although he required that Valeria should be described in the advertisements as the wife of “the celebrated ventriloquist, Mr. Brent Kayle,” thus seeking by faked notoriety to secure the sweets of fame, without the labor of achievement.
Valeria had welcomed the pacific settlement of the difficulty, because her “good money” earned in the show so brightened and beautified the evening of life for the venerable grandparents at home. For their sake she had conquered her dread of the lion in the pageant. ”

“ Valeria thought that cooks had simply to be advertised for, and they came.
“What naïveté!” exclaimed Hadria. “Helen was persuaded to cross the seas from her Spartan home to set Troy ablaze, and tarnish her fair fame, but it would take twenty sons of Priam to induce a damsel to come over dry land to Craddock Dene, to cook our dinners and retain her character.”
“You would almost imply that women don’t so very much care about their characters,” said Valeria. ”

“ In her native Nubia she had an evil reputation as a sorceress, and in Rome she still carried on by stealth her nefarious art. It was hinted, indeed, in the palace, that by her subtle, deadly potions she fulfilled her own prophecies of ill against the objects of the hatred of her employers.
"'Tis certain," hissed through her teeth the spiteful old Fausta, while murder gleamed from her sloe-black eyes, "that Galerius will not include in the Imperial rescript that painted doll, Valeria. She exerts unbounded fascination over him. It must be the spell of her false religion." ”

“ Things are dull as an old strigil. Oh, by the way," and he beckoned them into a recess behind a porphyry pillar, "there is going to be a precious row up at the palace. I tell you in confidence. The old vixen, Fausta, has got a new spite against the Empress Valeria, whom all the people of the palace love. The termagant is not fit to carry water for her bath. She has found some mare's nest of a Christian plot,—by the way you are mixed up in it, friend Isidorus. I would advise you to have a care. In the fight of Pagan against Christian, I fear Valeria will get the worst of it, dii avertant." ”

“ How had she the heart to deprive them of his willing aid? He declared he had intended to ask her to marry him anyhow, for she had always seemed to like him—she could not deny this—but now was the auspicious time—to-morrow—while the circus was in Shaftesville, and “good money” was to be had to provide for the wants of her old grandparents.
Though Valeria had flouted the talk of love she seemed his partisan when she confided the matter to the two old people and their consent was accorded rather for her sake than their own. ”

“ Her Valeria loved like a second mother, and Daia suspected that her advice had produced that refusal which Valeria gave to his matrimonial offers; and therefore he charged the president Eratineus to have her put to death in a way that might injure her fame. To her two others, equally noble, were added. One of them, who had a daughter a Vestal virgin at Rome, maintained an intercourse by stealth with the banished Valeria. The other, married to a senator, was intimately connected with the empress. Excellent beauty and virtue proved the cause of their death. ”

“ The answer of Valeria was such as became the daughter and widow of emperors; but it was tempered by the prudence which her defenceless condition compelled her to observe. She represented to the persons whom Maximin had employed on this occasion, 'that, even if honor could permit a woman of her character and dignity to entertain a thought of second nuptials, decency at least must forbid her to listen to his addresses at a time when the ashes of her husband and his benefactor were still warm, and while the sorrows of her mind were still expressed by her mourning garments. ”

“ “Are you free of each other, pretty Mrs. Valeria, by common consent of both parties?” ”

“ So great performance of a comical part," he continues, "was never, I believe, in the world before as Nell do this, both as a mad girle, then most and best of all when she comes in like a young gallant; and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her." In the part of Valeria, in "Tyrannic Love," she was also pronounced inimitable; especially in her delivery of the epilogue. The vein of comedy with which she delivered the opening lines, addressed to those about to bear her dead body from the stage, was merry beyond belief. ”

“ Valeriana, Amantilla and Fu are used as synonymous in the Alphita, a mediæval vocabulary of the school of Salernum. [1400]
Saladinus [1401] of Ascoli directs (circa a.d. 1450) the collection in the month of August of “radices fu id est valerianæ.” [Pg 378]
Valerian was anciently called in English Setwall, a name properly applied to Zedoary; and the root was so much valued for its medicinal virtues, that as Gerarde [1402] (1567) remarks, the poorer classes in the north of England esteemed “no broths, pottage, or physicall meats” to be worth anything without it. ”

“ People are always pleased with that which is novel, and up to this time there have been no kings on the throne bearing the name of Valeriano. I think Valeriano the First will make a very pretty autograph. ”

“ The other to Valerian her make.* *mate, husband
“With body clean, and with unwemmed* thought, *unspotted, blameless
Keep aye well these corones two,” quoth he;
“From Paradise to you I have them brought,
Nor ever more shall they rotten be,
Nor lose their sweet savour, truste me,
Nor ever wight shall see them with his eye,
But he be chaste, and hate villainy.
“And thou, Valerian, for thou so soon
Assented hast to good counsel, also
Say what thee list,* and thou shalt have thy boon.”** *wish **desire
“I have a brother,” quoth Valerian tho,* *then
“That in this world I love no man so ”

“ When Montes and Cydalise came upstairs, Valerie, standing before the fire, where a log was blazing, was allowing Wenceslas to lace her stays.
This is a moment when a woman who is neither too fat nor too thin, but like Valerie, elegant and slender, displays divine beauty. The rosy skin, mostly soft, invites the sleepiest eye. The lines of her figure, so little hidden, are so charmingly outlined by the white pleats of the shift and the support of the stays, that she is irresistible—like everything that must be parted from. ”

“ And her ladyship read to me a most flattering description of my sweet person, couched in very high-flown language.
“I think, Lady R—,” said I, when she had finished, “that you are more indebted to your own imagination than to reality in drawing my portrait.”
“Not so, not so, my dear Valerie. I may have done you justice, but certainly not more. There is nothing like having the living subject to write from. ”

“ No, no; when we arrive at that point, when we warm before no affection, doubting its truth; when we have gained this age-bought experience, which has left our hearts as dry as the remainder biscuits after a long voyage—there is no happiness in this, Valerie. Better to be deceived, and trust again. I almost wish that I could now be the dupe of a woman or a false friend, for I should then feel as if I were young again.”
“But, sir,” replied I, “your conduct is at variance with your language; why else such kindness shown to me, a perfect stranger, and one without claims upon you?” ”