Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

only a dozen words,- she employed a primitive directness that startled and confounded.

The Duchess drooped. The careless and scornful little laugh that she attempted ended suddenly in something like a mortified sob. Tempo-Rubato-to fall back upon a convenient metaphor-placed an instant hand on the hilt of his sword, while the other devilnot the laughing one-began to glitter in his eye. He had not, perhaps, the clearest idea in the world in whose behalf the weapon was to be wielded, but it was foreign to his nature to play passively the part of spectator: choice of sides was not so urgent as exercise of activity. But there are times when the most eager warrior must chafe under inactivity, when even the brawniest arm is paralyzed by circumstance. For though the Chatelaine turned on him a lofty look which flashed him far beyond the pale of any possible alliance with her, it was a look the fierceness of which forbade at the same time his open championship of the opposing side. However, she gave him scant opportunity for either. She passed rapidly on, and he was left, with a feeling of admiring wonder, to reflect that it was this girl whom he, only three months before, had presumed to treat with something but little removed from an amused and condescending indulgence.

X.

LA TRINITÉ: MIRAGE.

THE road up the Val Trinité begins with the suave and persuasive promise of chestnut and laurel, and ends in actuality with a dozen riven pines at the jagged and splintered base of a great glacier. The track runs between rugged slopes the bases of which are littered with mosscovered boulders and with scaly rocks overgrown with thickets of rhododendrons, crosses and recrosses a brawling torrent whose excesses become more unbounded with the advance of every half-mile, and passes through a dozen scattered hamlets the inhabitants of which change almost imperceptibly from Italian to German, but whose names remain obstinately French. And it was over this road that a carriage jolted one afternoon late in September, carrying the Chatelaine, her guest, and her duenna, old Mamzelle Margot, who had conducted her charge from La Trinité to Neuchatel, and who had now come down from the mountains to lead her home again.

The Chatelaine's home-coming was a very simple and unadorned affair, but it involved no particular disappointment to her romancing friend, who had fortunately prefigured that very little appreciation was to be expected from an uninstructed peasantry when so little had been accorded, within her easy recollection, by even

the lights of the polite world. She knew, of course, what was right in this connection, what might properly be expected, demanded. Her intimate acquaintance with light opera and lighter fiction made it impossible for anything to quench her ideal—an ideal involving a gay and graceful commingling of festoons and arches, of bonfires and hurrahs, a complaisant and unanimous throng before the inn,-a throng in gay bodices and sturdy leggings, with a ready tendency to drink healths with cheers and to flaunt gaily streaming ribbons with an airy abandon; but she was willing to accept whatever offered at present until enlightenment might dawn upon these well-disposed but uninformed mountaineers, and they could be shown what was to be done and given some idea of how to do it. It pleased her well enough, then, that a score of men, young and old, collected in the street, should have parted for the passage of their vehicle, and have ranged themselves almost involuntarily in two irregular lines, and have uncovered with every evidence of respect and good will. It gave her considerable satisfaction, too, when a group of half a dozen little girls came trudging up to the château with a big nosegay of homely and belated flowers, and shuffled their feet with a helpless awkwardness until the Chatelaine's gracious acceptance relieved them of their embarrassment and sent them away with a proud and smiling satisfaction. Nor did she find it amiss when, the next morning, a wheezy old dame shuffled in with a basket of eggs and a pair of stockings of her own knitting. There was material in all this, and promise.

To the place itself she gave the same qualified approval. If position was half the battle, as she had heard, the battle was half won, for the château stood on a rugged eminence a hundred feet above the village, and commanded a wide sweep of snowy peaks that rose above serried ranks of somber pines. But that its own actual features, external and internal, were equal to crowning the campaign with victory was not so certain. Should she be able to produce any broad and taking effects in a place so small, so simple, so domestic, so generally practicable for the ordinary living of to-day? Could she hope for stateliness in apartments so circumscribed? Was there really any opportunity for the grandiose with furnishings so meager, so familiar? Would it be possible to produce any great impression with such a plain and homely little band of servants? Well, she must do the best she could.

She at once entered upon a deft and halfdisguised course of manipulation. She advised, suggested, importuned, experimented. She changed, shifted, added, took away, renovated, reconstructed, made new presentations and

[graphic]

combinations. The Chatelaine, who now for the first time realized what a poor, plain place the home of her fathers really was, interposed no objections; she was quite willing to give full play to a genius who was so much better able than she herself to turn what there was to account; though Aurelia, now spurred on by the full frenzy of the creative spirit, would have exacted full play in any event.

It pained her to find that there was no portrait-gallery. This was one of the things on which her fancy had most fondly insisted, and she determined to make the omission good. There were four or five fair portraits hanging in the most accessible rooms in the lower part of the house, and a determined tour of inspection through various obscure and disused apartments yielded them three or four more, gratifyingly varied as to epoch. She even dragged an unwilling maid up to the eaves and garrets, where, thick with the dust of generations, she brought to light a pair of canvases which she proved to her own satisfaction to date back to the fore part of the seventeenth century. She begged the Chatelaine to allow all these pictures to be brought together in one room, and they spent the greater part of a day together in giving sequence and coherency to this motley collection. History, legend, anecdote, chronological probability, resemblance in nose and chin, the idle gossip and the cloudy recollection of old servants, were all drawn on, and the proud Chatelaine went to bed that night with the family genealogy for seven or eight generations codified, solidified, actual to the eye of the flesh.

Aurelia next attempted an armory. The long record of gallantry and heroism that had culminated at the steamboat-landing at Bellagio deserved and demanded some visible, palpable token; she burned for a long avenue of fame hedged in with monumental stacks of greaves and corselets and pikes and lances crossed. Their search for portraits had developed several rusty old muskets and fowling-pieces, but a most rigid examination of the whole place from cellar to garret brought forth nothing in the way of armor be yond a battered old cuirass. Aurelia, thus balked in her pursuit of the stately, fell back on the picturesque. She arranged the firearms, along with the portraits, in a dingy but spacious apartment, which still made a certain show in the way of wainscoting, and she associated with them the head of a chamois and also the head of a stag, which she induced one of the hostlers to renovate. In this room, which she called the Great Hall, the cuirass was given a prominent place; she put this relic in facile association with one of the early portraits, and begged the Chatelaine to ascertain by book, document, or tradition at what great battle her heroic ancestor had worn it. They presently found a name and a date; within a week

the new relative was firmly embedded in the mind, the heart, and the memory of the last of the race; and before a fortnight had passed she had made a dozen facile but proud allusions to the great glory of her house. Nor did Aurelia pause here. She revised the personnel of the place from Mamzelle Margot down. Mamzelle constituted something of a stumbling-block in the pathway of progress, and Aurelia employed considerable finesse in her attempt to raise this sturdy and homely person to the grade of ladycompanion. She established a scheme of precedence among the maids; she ranked the stablemen and gardeners; and she spent considerable time and thought in contriving a suitable envelop for the Chatelaine herself. Using one of the Milan gowns as a basis, she created a costume which she succeeded in persuading this guileless girl was in the height of the present mode, but which was indeed only a discreet little variation of her own on the fashion of the High German Renaissance—of the days of Maximilian, in fact. It was a garb marked by puffs at shoulder and elbow; it included a girdle from which hung a bunch of jangling keys; and it was finished with a close-fitting little cap of gold mesh worn well on the back of the head. It embodied the typical, the representative; it was a present token of power, importance, proprietorship; and when men and maids alike gazed on this new apparition with an admiring deference and awe as it trailed in slow state through hall and garden, Aurelia felt that she had not labored in vain.

The respite that followed these labors was not so long as their arduousness required, for word came shortly from the Governor, who had lingered behind at the lakes, that he would come on within a day or two and would bring Zeitgeist with him. Aurelia immediately shifted the barrel and resumed her work at the crank. Her opening measure related to the conveyance of these visitors up the Val Trinité. They should be met, and met, too, with a more creditable equipage than the one which had been found waiting for the Chatelaine and herselfan equipage for whose rusty harness and liveryless coachman she had chidden Margot as severely as she dared. She argued insistently from the past glories of the house the presence somewhere of some state-coach or other, nor did she rest until, in a remote annex to the stables, she found a dusty and battered vehicle whose faint traces of cracked carvings and dimmed gildings dated back to the old rococo days. She herself undertook the rehabilitation of the moth-eaten cushions; she insisted to Mamzelle Margot, temporarily reduced to her old position of housekeeper and general manager, that the harness must be furbished up; and she asked the Chatelaine what were the colors VOL. XLIV. 122.

of the traditional livery of the house, so that when they drove down the valley to meet the Governor and his companion,- Vittorio on the box, Franz and André up behind, and all three vivid in the facings that Aurelia's own needle had stitched into place,-they offered a spectacle to which the scattered hamlets of the Val Trinité had had no parallel for sixty years-one that for the like of which only the oldest of the elder generation of peasantry had any place in their memories.

The Governor had once before visited La Trinité, some years back, and he was not slow in observing the changes that had come between. He had not been received, then, en grand seigneur; no flag had been flung out from the topmost turret (another of Aurelia's ideas) as they had passed upward from the village; nor had the natural simplicity and bonhomie of the place been obliged to force its expression through a cumbersome overlayer of stiff formalities. The primitiveness of that early day compared with the ornate complexity of the present one as the naïve piping of strolling players compares with the strong, broad, determined chord that sometimes begins an overture. Aurelia West, he saw, had collected and organized the scattered potentialities of harmony, and was now leading them on with an irresistible sweep, and with a keen eye that took in the whole semicircle from double-bass to kettledrum; while the Chatelaine lay back with the pleased passivity of the lady-patroness in her loge.

But the Chatelaine's part presently became a more active one; she was led on to sing the leading rôle, and before an increased audience. When Mamzelle Margot came in one morning with the intelligence that two gentlemen were stopping below at the inn, Aurelia, whose powers of divination were quite equal to her powers of imagination, knew without the telling who they were. And when Tempo-Rubato and Finde-Siècle presented themselves in the dress of hunters, she did not need to be informed that they had worked their way along the mountains from the shooting-box above Bergamo, and that their ultimate destination was Paris. The idea, of course,was Tempo-Rubato's. Fin-de-Siècle, since his discomfiture at Bellagio, had no desire to expose himself to any further risk, and he was finding their rough scramble over the mountains a good deal of an ordeal, being less the hunter than the mere urban sportsman. But Tempo-Rubato had pushed all opposition aside. He was determined upon once more seeing the Lady of La Trinité; the only person capable of interesting him was the one who could jog his imagination. No woman before had ever checked or cowed him; he would view the leopardess in her own lair.

The Chatelaine received the newcomers in that great hall which Aurelia West had created for her. Her air, to Tempo-Rubato, seemed full of a chill stateliness, yet hardly designed as the protest of injured dignity. The Chatelaine's indignation, in fact, had been much less directed against Tempo-Rubato than against the Pasdenom, and her forbidding aspect was now assumed principally as a help toward holding her own. She knew that her home, despite the embellishments of the revolutionary Aurelia, was a poor place still, and far beneath any possible comparison with the great houses that had entertained her, and she was relying less upon her material environment than upon her inner consciousness. The portraits, the trophies, and the hauteur of Aurelia gave her some support, it is true; but in the end she was herself, and that was enough.

The stage being set, and the performers brought together, Aurelia now proceeded to the play. It was impossible to make this as impressive, as ambitious, as she desired, but here, again, she should do her best. No great fête was possible-there was no one to summon. The only persons of any consideration that the community yielded were the priest and the schoolmaster, and the Chatelaine had no neighbors. But a dinner could easily be accomplished; the guests were already on hand. It must be small, but it should be too stately, too elaborate, for any intrusion of the informal, the familiar. The most satisfactory thing that Aurelia had found about La Trinité was its service of plate, and she arranged a menu fit for the dishes. It was drawn up on the best Parisian models, and was partly carried out by Aurelia's own efforts, for its succession of courses, its divisions and subdivisions, went far beyond any notions entertained in regard to dining by Mamzelle Margot. Together they explored the cellar for wine in which the Chatelaine's health might be drunk: a ceremony for which the Governor (prompted by Aurelia) took the head of the table, and with alacrity. This attention the Chatelaine received with no false modesty, no self-deprecating shrinkings, but with a high and serious sense of acknowledging a just due.

Excursions followed. These were for the display of the new equipage, for which Aurelia designed a loftier career than that of mere omnibus. These drives, limited in number and in length by the weight of the vehicle and the roughness of the country, made it necessary to furnish saddle-horses for those who could find no place in the coach. Two animals, therefore, were sent up from their farm-work two or three miles down the valley, and when Aurelia referred to the party and its progresses she was accustomed to use the word "caval

cade." She probably had the word before she had the fact.

There were excursions on foot. These led them to other valleys by rough and stony footpaths across rocky ridges, and over the vast glaciers, too, that the mountain sent down into the Chatelaine's own valley. On several of these expeditions it was Aurelia's desire that her friend, most robust and tireless of walkers, should be transported in a chaise-à-porteurs, a novel experience for the Chatelaine, but one that, having tried, she was quite willing to repeat. Aurelia herself, lest she impair the Chatelaine's distinction by a duplication of her conveyance, tramped along on foot as best she might. But she took good care that Bertha had a cavalier on each side, that she should require a good deal of attention, and that she received it-all this to the curious wonder of Zeitgeist. The Chatelaine fell into this new pose quite easily; it did not seem very difficult for her to lean back among her cushions and to nod and beckon and command. Merit must make its demands; humility received no recompense; a firm and high audacity not only obtained its dues, but in doing so set a higher standard for dues more exacting still. So one of her attendants would be despatched for milk to some chalet more or less inaccessible, another would be hurried forward a quarter of a mile to figure out the probabilities of some obscure path, and a third would be bound down to an exacting study of the relative positions of chair, sun, and parasol Even Aurelia herself did not abstain from various little offices: the chief priestess, having niched the idol and drawn aside the curtain, was only too glad to rush out and lead the worship by her own prostrations. To the very last it never occurred to this zealot to ask herself if her fellow-worshipers were really devotees, or, being such, to what high pitch their adoration might be pushed before zeal drooped to lassitude. She did not clearly bear in mind that Fin-de-Siècle was a skeptic rather than a devotee, and that but little was needed to tura the skeptic into a scoffer; she did not perceive that Zeitgeist was no worshiper, but a coi aloof-standing scholar and critic; she did not feel that Tempo-Rubato, while a possible wor shiper, yet preferred to select his saint for himself and to follow his own rubric. So she went on, stifling her little band with the fumes of incense, deafening it with the clangor of bells, and driving the half-hearted converts to apostasy by the maddening monotone of her ritual of praise.

Presently came the first signs of relapse: the young men began to question one another. Where, asked Fin-de-Siècle, was that naivete so grateful to the jaded man of the world

(he meant himself), the only thing capable of soothing his wearied spirit? What, asked Zeitgeist, had become of the sturdy helpfulness which had no need to make a man into a lackey, and which no person of sense and capability could undervalue? Whither, asked Tempo-Rubato, had vanished that simple innocence which even the greatest reprobate among men admired and respected beyond the vastest store of knowledge that woman could amass? No answers came. Zeitgeist (the others too) inveighed bitterly, as more than once before, against the tyranny of sex-an importation now establishing itself in his own world. Finde-Siècle declared that he had canceled his last chapters, and hardly knew whether he should write others to take their place: what was more discouraging than to discover a supposedly new and lovely type, to fix it, and then to find in an altered light or from a shifted point of view but a reexpression of the old and the familiar? Things such as these, he moaned, drove the artist to despair. Tempo-Rubato sighed sincerely over this great and growing change, and when, on the occasion of their last reunion in the Chatelaine's drawing-room, he sang, in his own key,

Spirito gentil, nei sogni miei.
Brillasti un' di e ti perdei,

it was almost in the accents of elegy.

Yes, the time for passing on had come, and Aurelia, within a quarter of an hour after the ceasing of Tempo-Rubato's song, made her final coup. She advanced to the oriel and drew aside the curtain, and the same white moonlight that enveloped her flooded the town and the valley and touched the great dome of the mountain with a cold and ethereal pallor. She extended her hand toward those white and climbing slopes, and declared that a sprig of edelweiss brought thence by each of the three would please the castle's lady. And the Chatelaine, robed superbly in the creamy splendors of Milan, swept promptly into the moonlight, and with stately acquiescence in her friend's suggestion announced that she would highly prize such parting tokens of regard. There was an instant of silence-silence stabbed by surprise. Zeitgeist heard this almost incredulous and altogether indignant. He remembered that the Chatelaine had once plucked for herself a blossom from one of the lower of those slopes, nor had he forgotten the bruised knees and lacerated wrists that had resulted from his endeavors to gratify Miss West's propensity for inaccessible flora. Fin-de-Siècle started back almost appalled; they had made him ruin his

trousers, and now they asked him to lay down his life. Tempo-Rubato gave a faint sigh of impatient protest; in this craze to exact tribute what malign promptings always suggested a tribute that was floral? The Chatelaine repeated her declaration, and announced that she should wish them God-speed as they sallied forth in the morning.

At daylight there came the first, faint fall of snow. At ten her guests set out.

Fin-de-Siècle's tribute was the first to reach La Trinité. It came from Paris. The petals of his flower were of spun silver; its heart was a pearl. The velvet case inclosing it was of the color of the Chatelaine's new liveries.

Zeitgeist's offering came next-from the Vintschgau. He sent not a single spray, but a dozen, all carefully arranged, labeled, framed, a tablet to his own energy and daring. The dozen flowers were from a dozen different places, formidable peaks, dizzy passes,—but not one of them had been plucked within twenty miles of La Trinité.

Last of all came Tempo-Rubato's. He sent a painting, the work of his own hand. In the immediate foreground his edelweiss, the size of life, blossomed on the corner of a rocky and inaccessible ledge. The background presented in a marvelously small space a wide desolation of jagged peak and dazzling snow-field. In the middle distance a single figure-The TempoRubato of the Lucerne steamer - appeared at a sudden rocky angle, but whether in advance or in retreat it was difficult to say. A wide, impassable chasm separated him from the flower, but across it he seemed to flash a mocking smile of adieu.

LAST summer a wayfarer descended from the glacial fields above La Trinité, and trudged downward through the valley. Some four or five miles below the château he passed a group of clever-looking young men who were occupied with a three-legged instrument constructed of brass and mahogany, and who had left a trail of stakes behind them. Farther on he passed a group of laborers busy on an embankment that had come to dispute the passage with the brawling stream. A mile lower the gaunt form of a great iron truss spanned the river, and from beyond the jutting crag that closed the view came the muffled shriek of a steam-whistle. He went no farther.

In retracing his steps through La Trinité, he paused at the inn, and, looking up at the château, inquired after its mistress. She had left the valley. The Chatelaine-her way prepared, her path made straight—was now in Paris.

[blocks in formation]
« AnkstesnisTęsti »