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Vittoria, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Vittoria, Complete




At the mention of this name, Agostino and Vittoria laughed out.

"You are in the pay of the Signor Antonio-Pericles," said Agostino.
"Without being in our pay, you have done us the service to come up here
among us! Bravo! In return for your disinterestedness, we kick you down,
either upon Baveno or upon Stresa, or across the lake, if you prefer
it.--The man is harmless. He is hired by a particular worshipper of the
signorina's voice, who affects to have first discovered it when she was
in England, and is a connoisseur, a millionaire, a Greek, a rich
scoundrel, with one indubitable passion, for which I praise him. We will
let his paid eavesdropper depart, I think. He is harmless."

Neither Ugo nor Marco was disposed to allow any description of spy to
escape unscotched. Vittoria saw that Luigi's looks were against him, and
whispered: "Why do you show such cunning eyes, Luigi?"

He replied: "Signorina, take me out of their hearing, and I will tell you
everything."

She walked aside. He seemed immediately to be inspired with confidence,
and stretched his fingers in the form of a grasshopper, at which sight
they cried: "He knows Barto Rizzo--this rascal!" They plied him with
signs and countersigns, and speedily let him go. There ensued a sharp
snapping of altercation between Luigi and Beppo. Vittoria had to order
Beppo to stand back.

"It is a poor dog, not of a good breed, signorina," Luigi said, casting a
tolerant glance over his shoulder. "Faithful, but a poor nose. Ah! you
gave me this cigarette. Not the Virgin could have touched my marrow as
you did. That's to be remembered by-and-by. Now, you are going to sing on
the night of the fifteenth of September. Change that night. The Signor
Antonio-Pericles watches you, and he is a friend of the Government, and
the Government is snoring for you to think it asleep. The Signor
Antonio-Pericles pacifies the Tedeschi, but he will know all that you are
doing, and how easy it will be, and how simple, for you to let me know
what you think he ought to know, and just enough to keep him comfortable!
So we work like a machine, signorina. Only, not through that Beppo, for
he is vain of his legs, and his looks, and his service, and because he
has carried a gun and heard it go off. Yes; I am a spy. But I am honest.
I, too, have visited England. One can be honest and a spy. Signorina, I
have two arms, but only one heart. If you will be gracious and consider!
Say, here are two hands. One hand does this thing, one hand does that
thing, and that thing wipes out this thing. It amounts to clear
reasoning! Here are two eyes. Were they meant to see nothing but one
side! Here is a tongue with a line down the middle almost to the tip of
it--which is for service. That Beppo couldn't deal double, if he would;
for he is imperfectly designed--a mere dog's pattern! But, only one
heart, signorina--mind that. I will never forget the cigarette. I shall
smoke it before I leave the mountain, and think--oh!"

Having illustrated the philosophy of his system, Luigi continued: "I am
going to tell you everything. Pray, do not look on Beppo! This is
important. The Signor Antonio-Pericles sent me to spy on you, because he
expects some people to come up the mountain, and you know them; and one
is an Austrian officer, and he is an Englishman by birth, and he is
coming to meet some English friends who enter Italy from Switzerland over
the Moro, and easily up here on mules or donkeys from Pella. The Signor
Antonio-Pericles has gold ears for everything that concerns the
signorina. 'A patriot is she!' he says; and he is jealous of your English
friends. He thinks they will distract you from your studies; and
perhaps"--Luigi nodded sagaciously before he permitted himself to
say--"perhaps he is jealous in another way. I have heard him speak like a
sonnet of the signorina's beauty. The Signor Antonio-Pericles thinks that
you have come here to-day to meet them. When he heard that you were going
to leave Milan for Baveno, he was mad, and with two fists up, against all
English persons. The Englishman who is an Austrian officer is quartered
at Verona, and the Signor Antonio Pericles said that the Englishman should
not meet you yet, if he could help it."

Victoria stood brooding. "Who can it be,--who is an Englishman, and an
Austrian officer, and knows me?"

"Signorina, I don't know names. Behold, that Beppo is approaching like
the snow! What I entreat is, that the signorina will wait a little for
the English party, if they come, so that I may have something to tell my
patron. To invent upon nothing is most unpleasant, and the Signor Antonio
can soon perceive whether one swims with corks. Signorina, I can dance on
one rope--I am a man. I am not a midge--I cannot dance upon nothing."

The days of Vittoria's youth had been passed in England. It was not
unknown to her that old English friends were on the way to Italy; the
recollection of a quiet and a buried time put a veil across her features.
She was perplexed by the mention of the Austrian officer by Luigi, as one
may be who divines the truth too surely, but will not accept it for its
loathsomeness. There were Englishmen in the army of Austria. Could one of
them be this one whom she had cared for when she was a girl? It seemed
hatefully cruel to him to believe it. She spoke to Agostino, begging him
to remain with her on the height awhile to see whether the Signor
Antonio-Pericles was right; to see whether Luigi was a truth-teller; to
see whether these English persons were really coming. "Because," she
said, "if they do come, it will at once dissolve any suspicions you may
have of this Luigi. And I always long so much to know if the Signor
Antonio is correct. I have never yet known him to be wrong."

"And you want to see these English," said Agostino. He frowned.

"Only to hear them. They shall not recognize me. I have now another name;
and I am changed. My hat is enough to hide me. Let me hear them talk a
little. You and the Signor Carlo will stay with me, and when they come,
if they do come, I will remain no longer than just sufficient to make
sure. I would refuse to know any of them before the night of the
fifteenth; I want my strength too much. I shall have to hear a misery
from them; I know it, I feel it; it turns my blood. But let me hear their
voices! England is half my country, though I am so willing to forget her
and give all my life to Italy. Stay with me, dear friend, my best father!
humour me, for you know that I am always charming when I am humoured."

Agostino pressed his finger on a dimple in her cheeks. "You can afford to
make such a confession as that to a greybeard. The day is your own. Bear
in mind that you are so situated that it will be prudent for you to have
no fresh relations, either with foreigners or others, until your work is
done,--in which, my dear child, may God bless you!"

"I pray to him with all my might," Vittoria said in reply.

After a consultation with Agostino, Ugo Corte and Marco and Giulio bade
their adieux to her. The task of keeping Luigi from their clutches was
difficult; but Agostino helped her in that also. To assure them, after
his fashion, of the harmlessness of Luigi, he seconded him in a contest
of wit against Beppo, and the little fellow, now that he had shaken off
his fears, displayed a quickness of retort and a liveliness "unknown to
professional spies and impossible to the race," said Agostino; "so
absolutely is the mind of man blunted by Austrian gold. We know that for
a fact. Beppo is no match for him. Beppo is sententious; ponderously
illustrative; he can't turn; he is long-winded; he, I am afraid, my
Carlo, studies the journals. He has got your journalistic style, wherein
words of six syllables form the relief to words of eight, and hardly one
dares to stand by itself. They are like huge boulders across a brook. The
meaning, do you, see, would run of itself, but you give us these
impedimenting big stones to help us over it, while we profess to
understand you by implication. For my part, I own, that to me, your
parliamentary, illegitimate academic, modern crocodile phraseology, which
is formidable in the jaws, impenetrable on the back, can't circumvent a
corner, and is enabled to enter a common understanding solely by having a
special highway prepared for it,--in short, the writing in your journals
is too much for me. Beppo here is an example that the style is useless
for controversy. This Luigi baffles him at every step."

"Some," rejoined Carlo, "say that Beppo has had the virtue to make you
his study."

Agostino threw himself on his back and closed his eyes. "That, then, is
more than you have done, signor Tuquoque. Look on the Bernina yonder, and
fancy you behold a rout of phantom Goths; a sleepy rout, new risen, with
the blood of old battles on their shroud-shirts, and a North-east wind
blowing them upon our fat land. Or take a turn at the other side toward
Orta, and look out for another invasion, by no means so picturesque, but
preferable. Tourists! Do you hear them?"

Carlo Ammiani had descried the advanced troop of a procession of
gravely-heated climbers ladies upon donkeys, and pedestrian guards
stalking beside them, with courier, and lacqueys, and baskets of
provisions, all bearing the stamp of pilgrims from the great Western
Island.




CHAPTER VI

A mountain ascended by these children of the forcible Isle, is a mountain
to be captured, and colonized, and absolutely occupied for a term; so
that Vittoria soon found herself and her small body of adherents
observed, and even exclaimed against, as a sort of intruding aborigines,
whose presence entirely dispelled the sense of romantic dominion which a
mighty eminence should give, and which Britons expect when they have
expended a portion of their energies. The exclamations were not
complimentary; nevertheless, Vittoria listened with pleased ears, as one
listens by a brookside near an old home, hearing a music of memory rather
than common words. They talked of heat, of appetite, of chill, of thirst,
of the splendour of the prospect, of the anticipations of good hotel
accommodation below, of the sadness superinduced by the reflection that
in these days people were found everywhere, and poetry was thwarted;
again of heat, again of thirst, of beauty, and of chill. There was the
enunciation of matronly advice; there was the outcry of girlish
insubordination; there were sighings for English ale, and namings of the
visible ranges of peaks, and indicatings of geographical fingers to show
where Switzerland and Piedmont met, and Austria held her grasp on
Lombardy; and "to this point we go to-night; yonder to-morrow; farther
the next day," was uttered, soberly or with excitement, as befitted the
age of the speaker.

Among these tourists there was one very fair English lady, with long
auburn curls of the traditionally English pattern, and the science of
Paris displayed in her bonnet and dress; which, if not as graceful as
severe admirers of the antique in statuary or of the mediaeval in drapery
demand, pleads prettily to be thought so, and commonly succeeds in its
object, when assisted by an artistic feminine manner. Vittoria heard her
answer to the name of Mrs. Sedley. She had once known her as a Miss Adela
Pole. Amidst the cluster of assiduous gentlemen surrounding this lady it
was difficult for Vittoria's stolen glances to discern her husband; and
the moment she did discern him she became as indifferent to him as was
his young wife, by every manifestation of her sentiments. Mrs. Sedley
informed her lord that it was not expected of him to care, or to pretend
to care, for such scenes as the Motterone exhibited; and having dismissed
him to the shade of an umbrella near the provision baskets, she took her
station within a few steps of Vittoria, and allowed her attendant
gentlemen to talk while she remained plunged in a meditative rapture at
the prospect. The talk indicated a settled scheme for certain members of
the party to reach Milan from the Como road. Mrs. Sedley was asked if she
expected her brother to join her here or in Milan.

"Here, if a man's promises mean anything," she replied languidly.

She was told that some one waved a handkerchief to them from below.

"Is he alone?" she said; and directing an operaglass upon the slope of
the mountain, pursued, as in a dreamy disregard of circumstances: "That
is Captain Gambier. My brother Wilfrid has not kept his appointment.
Perhaps he could not get leave from the General; perhaps he is married;
he is engaged to an Austrian Countess, I have heard. Captain Gambier did
me the favour to go round to a place called Stresa to meet him. He has
undertaken the journey for nothing. It is the way with all journeys
though this" (the lady had softly reverted to her rapture) "this is too
exquisite! Nature at least does not deceive."

Vittoria listened to a bubbling of meaningless chatter, until Captain
Gambier had joined Mrs. Sedley; and at him, for she had known him
likewise, she could not forbear looking up. He was speaking to Mrs.
Sedley, but caught the look, and bent his head for a clearer view of the
features under the broad straw hat. Mrs. Sedley commanded him imperiously
to say on.

"Have you no letter from Wilfrid? Has the mountain tired you? Has Wilfrid
failed to send his sister one word? Surely Mr. Pericles will have made
known our exact route to him? And his uncle, General Pierson, could--I am
certain he did--exert his influence to procure him leave for a single
week to meet the dearest member of his family."

Captain Gambier gathered his wits to give serviceable response to the
kindled lady, and letting his eyes fall from time to time on the broad
straw hat, made answer--"Lieutenant Pierson, or, in other words, Wilfrid
Pole--"

The lady stamped her foot and flushed.

"You know, Augustus, I detest that name."

"Pardon me a thousandfold. I had forgotten."

"What has happened to you?"

Captain Gambier accused the heat.

"I found a letter from Wilfrid at the hotel. He is apparently kept on
constant service between Milan, and Verona, and Venice. His quarters are
at Verona. He informs me that he is to be married in the Spring; that is,
if all continues quiet; married in the Spring. He seems to fancy that
there may be disturbances; not of a serious kind, of course. He will meet
you in Milan. He has never been permitted to remain at Milan longer than
a couple of days at a stretch. Pericles has told him that she is in
Florence. Pericles has told me that Miss Belloni has removed to
Florence."

"Say it a third time," the lady indulgently remarked.

"I do not believe that she has gone."

"I dare say not."

"She has changed her name, you know."

"Oh, dear, yes; she has done something fantastic, naturally! For my part,
I should have thought her own good enough."

"Emilia Alessandra Belloni is good enough, certainly," said Captain
Gambier.

The shading straw rim had shaken once during the colloquy. It was now a
fixed defence.

"What is her new name?" Mrs. Sedley inquired.

"That I cannot tell. Wilfrid merely mentions that he has not seen her."

"I," said Mrs. Sedley, "when I reach Milan, shall not trust to Mr.
Pericles, but shall write to the Conservatorio; for if she is going to be
a great cantatrice, really, it will be agreeable to renew acquaintance
with her. Nor will it do any mischief to Wilfrid, now that he is engaged.
Are you very deeply attached to straw hats? They are sweet in a
landscape."

Mrs. Sedley threw him a challenge from her blue eyes; but his reply to it
was that of an unskilled youth, who reads a lady by the letters of her
speech:--"One minute. I will be with you instantly. I want to have a look
down on the lake. I suppose this is one of the most splendid views in
Italy. Half a minute!"

Captain Gambier smiled brilliantly; and the lady, perceiving that
polished shield, checked the shot of indignation on her astonished
features, and laid it by. But the astonishment lingered there, like the
lines of a slackened bow. She beheld her ideal of an English gentleman
place himself before these recumbent foreign people, and turn to talk
across them, with a pertinacious pursuit of the face under the bent straw
hat. Nor was it singular to her that one of them at last should rise and
protest against the continuation of the impertinence.

Carlo Ammiani, in fact, had opened matters with a scrupulously-courteous
bow.

"Monsieur is perhaps unaware that he obscures the outlook?"

"Totally, monsieur," said Captain Gambier, and stood fast.

"Will monsieur do me the favour to take three steps either to the right
or to the left?"

"Pardon, monsieur, but the request is put almost in the form of an
order."

"Simply if it should prove inefficacious in the form of a request."

"What, may I ask, monsieur, is your immediate object?"

"To entreat you to behave with civility."

"I am at a loss, monsieur, to perceive any offence."

"Permit me to say, it is lamentable you do not know when you insult a
lady."

"I have insulted a lady?" Captain Gambier looked profoundly incredulous.
"Oh! then you will not take exception to my assuming the privilege to
apologize to her in person?"

Ammiani arrested him as he was about to pass.

"Stay, monsieur; you determine to be impudent, I perceive; you shall not
be obtrusive."

Vittoria had tremblingly taken old Agostino's hand, and had risen to her
feet. Still keeping her face hidden, she walked down the slope, followed
at an interval by her servant, and curiously watched by the English
officer, who said to himself, "Well, I suppose I was mistaken," and
consequently discovered that he was in a hobble.

A short duologue in their best stilted French ensued between him and
Ammiani. It was pitched too high in a foreign tongue for Captain Gambier
to descend from it, as he would fain have done, to ask the lady's name.
They exchanged cards and formal salutes, and parted.

The dignified altercation had been witnessed by the main body of the
tourists. Captain Gambier told them that he had merely interchanged
amicable commonplaces with the Frenchman,--"or Italian," he added
carelessly, reading the card in his hand. "I thought she might be
somebody whom we knew," he said to Mrs. Sedley.

"Not the shadow of a likeness to her," the lady returned.

She had another opinion when later a scrap of paper bearing one pencilled
line on it was handed round. A damsel of the party had picked it up near
the spot where, as she remarked, "the foreigners had been sitting." It
said:--

"Let none who look for safety go to Milan."




CHAPTER VII

A week following the day of meetings on the Motterone, Luigi the spy was
in Milan, making his way across the Piazza de' Mercanti. He entered a
narrow court, one of those which were anciently built upon the Oriental
principle of giving shade at the small cost of excluding common air. It
was dusky noon there through the hours of light, and thrice night when
darkness fell. The atmosphere, during the sun's short passage overhead,
hung with a glittering heaviness, like the twinkling iron-dust in a
subterranean smithy. On the lower window of one of the houses there was a
board, telling men that Barto Rizzo made and mended shoes, and requesting
people who wished to see him to make much noise at the door, for he was
hard of hearing. It speedily became known in the court that a visitor
desired to see Barto Rizzo. The noise produced by Luigi was like that of
a fanatical beater of the tomtom; he knocked and banged and danced
against the door, crying out for his passing amusement an adaptation of a
popular ballad:--"Oh, Barto, Barto! my boot is sadly worn: The toe is
seen that should be veiled from sight. The toe that should be veiled like
an Eastern maid: like a sultan's daughter: Shocking! shocking! One of a
company of ten that were living a secluded life in chaste privacy! Oh,
Barto, Barto! must I charge it to thy despicable leather or to my
incessant pilgrimages? One fair toe! I fear presently the corruption of
the remaining nine: Then, alas! what do I go on? How shall I come to a
perfumed end, who walk on ten indecent toes? Well may the delicate
gentlemen sneer at me and scorn me: As for the angelic Lady who deigns to
look so low, I may say of her that her graciousness clothes what she
looks at: To her the foot, the leg, the back: To her the very soul is
bared: But she is a rarity upon earth. Oh, Barto, Barto, she is rarest in
Milan! I might run a day's length and not find her. If, O Barto, as my
boot hints to me, I am about to be stripped of my last covering, I must
hurry to the inconvenient little chamber of my mother, who cannot refuse
to acknowledge me as of this pattern: Barto, O shoemaker! thou son of
artifice and right-hand-man of necessity, preserve me in the fashion of
the time: Cobble me neatly: A dozen wax threads and I am
remade:--Excellent! I thank you! Now I can plant my foot bravely: Oh,
Barto, my shoemaker! between ourselves, it is unpleasant in these refined
days to be likened at all to that preposterous Adam!"

The omission of the apostrophes to Barto left it one of the ironical,
veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung
about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not
from a perception of the double edge down the length of them.

As Luigi was coming to the terminating line, the door opened. A very
handsome sullen young woman, of the dark, thick-browed Lombard type,
asked what was wanted; at the same time the deep voice of a man;
conjecturally rising from a lower floor, called, and a lock was rattled.
The woman told Luigi to enter. He sent a glance behind him; he had
evidently been drained of his sprightliness in a second; he moved in with
the slackness of limb of a gibbeted figure. The door shut; the woman led
him downstairs. He could not have danced or sung a song now for great
pay. The smell of mouldiness became so depressing to him that the smell
of leather struck his nostrils refreshingly. He thought: "Oh, Virgin!
it's dark enough to make one believe in every single thing they tell us
about the saints." Up in the light of day Luigi had a turn for careless
thinking on these holy subjects.

Barto Rizzo stood before him in a square of cellarage that was furnished
with implements of his craft, too dark for a clear discernment of
features.

"So, here you are!" was the greeting Luigi received.

It was a tremendous voice, that seemed to issue from a vast cavity. "Lead
the gentleman to my sitting-room," said Barto. Luigi felt the wind of a
handkerchief, and guessed that his eyes were about to be bandaged by the
woman behind him. He petitioned to be spared it, on the plea, firstly,
that it expressed want of confidence; secondly, that it took him in the
stomach. The handkerchief was tight across his eyes while he was
speaking. His hand was touched by the woman, and he commenced timidly an
ascent of stairs. It continued so that he would have sworn he was a
shorter time going up the Motterone; then down, and along a passage;
lower down, deep into corpse-climate; up again, up another enormous
mountain; and once more down, as among rats and beetles, and down, as
among faceless horrors, and down, where all things seemed prostrate and
with a taste of brass. It was the poor fellow's nervous imagination,
preternaturally excited. When the handkerchief was caught away, his jaw
was shuddering, his eyes were sickly; he looked as if impaled on the
prongs of fright. It required just half a minute to reanimate this
mercurial creature, when he found himself under the light of two lamps,
and Barto Rizzo fronting him, in a place so like the square of cellarage
which he had been led to with unbandaged eyes, that it relieved his dread
by touching his humour. He cried, "Have I made the journey of the Signor
Capofinale, who visited the other end of the world by standing on his
head?"

Barto Rizzo rolled out a burly laugh.

"Sit," he said. "You're a poor sweating body, and must needs have a dry
tongue. Will you drink?"

"Dry!" quoth Luigi. "Holy San Carlo is a mash in a wine-press compared
with me."

Barto Rizzo handed him a liquor, which he drank, and after gave thanks to
Providence. Barto raised his hand.

"We're too low down here for that kind of machinery," he said. "They say
that Providence is on the side of the Austrians. Now then, what have you
to communicate to me? This time I let you come to my house trust at all,
trust entirely. I think that's the proverb. You are admitted: speak like
a guest."

Luigi's preference happened to be for categorical interrogations. Never
having an idea of spontaneously telling the whole truth, the sense that
he was undertaking a narrative gave him such emotions as a bad swimmer
upon deep seas may have; while, on the other hand, his being subjected to
a series of questions seemed at least to leave him with one leg on shore,
for then he could lie discreetly, and according to the finger-posts, and
only when necessary, and he could recover himself if he made a false
step. His ingenious mind reasoned these images out to his own
satisfaction. He requested, therefore, that his host would let him hear
what he desired to know.