The Marquise of O and Other Stories (28 page)

In the meantime, as soon as the first main fighting at the windows was over, Herr Strömli's sons Adelbert and Gottfried had on their father's instructions hurried to their cousin Gustav's room, and had been fortunate enough to overcome, after a stubborn resistance, the two blacks who were guarding him. One of them lay dead in the room; the other, shot and severely wounded, had dragged himself out into the corridor. The brothers, the elder of whom had himself been wounded, though only slightly, in the thigh, untied their dear beloved cousin from the bed: they embraced and kissed him, gave him firearms and other weapons, and joyfully invited him to accompany them to the front room where, since victory was now assured, Herr Strömli would no doubt be already making all the arrangements for their withdrawal. But their cousin Gustav, half sitting up in the bed, merely pressed their hands warmly; he was silent and distracted, and instead of taking the pistols they offered him, raised his right hand to his forehead and passed it across it in a gesture of inexpressible sorrow. The young men had sat down beside him and asked what was wrong; he put his arms round them and laid his head on the younger brother's shoulder without saying a word; and just as Adelbert, thinking he was going to faint, was about to rise and fetch him a glass of water, the door opened and Toni entered carrying the boy Seppy and holding Herr Strömli by the hand. At this sight Gustav changed colour: he stood up, clinging to his friends for support as if he were on the verge of collapsing, and before the two youths could tell what he intended to do with the pistol he now snatched from them, he had, gritting his teeth with rage, fired a shot straight at Toni. It went right through her breast; with a stifled cry of pain she staggered another
few steps towards him and then, handing the little boy to Herr Strömli, sank down at his feet; but he hurled the pistol over her to the ground, kicked her away from him, calling her a whore, and threw himself down on the bed. ‘Why, you monster!' cried Herr Strömli and his two sons. The latter rushed to the girl, raised her in their arms and shouted for one of the old servants who during their march had given medical assistance in many similar desperate cases; but the girl, convulsively pressing her hand against the wound, pushed her friends back, and pointing to the man who had shot her gasped brokenly with her last breath: ‘Tell him –!', and again, ‘tell him –!' ‘What are we to tell him?' asked Herr Strömli, for death was robbing her of speech. Adelbert and Gottfried rose to their feet and cried out to the perpetrator of this appalling and senseless murder: ‘Do you not know that this girl saved your life, that she loves you and that it was her intention to escape to Port-au-Prince with you, to whom she has sacrificed everything, her parents, and all she had?' They shouted into his ears: ‘Gustav! can't you hear us?', and shook him and pulled him by the hair, for he was lying on the bed heedless of them and of everything. Gustav sat up. He glanced at the girl where she lay writhing in her blood, and the fury which had impelled him to the deed gave way not unnaturally to a feeling of common compassion. Herr Strömli, weeping hot tears and with his handkerchief to his eyes, asked him: ‘Wretched man, why did you do that?' Cousin Gustav, who had risen from the bed and was standing looking down at the girl and wiping the sweat from his brow, answered that she had with infamous treachery tied him up in the night and handed him over to Hoango the negro. ‘Oh!' cried Toni, reaching out her hand towards him with a look no words can describe, ‘dearest friend, I tied you up, because –!' but she could not speak, nor even reach him with her hand; her strength suddenly failed her and she fell back on to Herr Strömli's lap. ‘Why?' asked Gustav, turning
pale and kneeling down beside her. Herr Strömli, after a long pause during which they waited in vain for an answer from Toni, the silence broken only by her dying gasps, replied for her and said: ‘Because, unhappy man, there was no other way to save you after Hoango's arrival; because she wanted to prevent the fight you would undoubtedly have started, and to gain time until we reached you, for thanks to her we were already hurrying here to rescue you by force of arms.' Gustav buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh!' he cried without looking up, and the earth seemed to give way under his feet, ‘is this true, what you are telling me?' He put his arm round her and gazed into her face, his heart rent with anguish. ‘Oh', cried Toni, and these were her last words, ‘you should not have mistrusted me!' And so saying, the noble-hearted girl expired. Gustav tore his hair. ‘It's true!' he exclaimed, as his cousins dragged him away from the corpse, ‘I should not have mistrusted you, for you were betrothed to me by a vow, although we had not put it into words!' Herr Strömli, lamenting, undid the girl's bodice and urged the servant, who was standing by with a few crude instruments, to try to extract the bullet which he thought must have lodged in her breast-bone; but all their efforts, as we have said, were in vain, the shot had pierced right through her and her soul had already departed to a better world. During this, Gustav had gone over to the window; and while Herr Strömli and his sons, weeping silently, were discussing what was to be done with the body, and whether the girl's mother should be called to the scene, he took up the other, still loaded pistol, and blew his brains out with it. This new deed of horror threw his kinsmen into utter consternation. He it was whom they now tried to help; but the wretched man's skull was completely shattered, parts of it indeed adhering to the surrounding walls, for he had thrust the pistol into his mouth. Herr Strömli was the first to regain his composure, for already bright daylight was shining through the windows and the
negroes were reported to be stirring again in the courtyard; there was therefore no choice but to begin the company's immediate withdrawal from the settlement. Not wishing to abandon the two dead bodies to the wanton violence of the negroes, they laid them on a board, and the party with muskets reloaded set out in sorrowful procession towards the seagull pond. Herr Strömli, carrying the boy Seppy, walked first; next came the two strongest servants bearing the dead bodies on their shoulders; behind them the wounded man limped along with the help of a stick; and Adelbert and Gottfried escorted the slowly advancing cortège, one at each side, with their guns cocked. The negroes, seeing the group so weakly defended, emerged from then-quarters with pikes and pitchforks and seemed to be about to launch an attack; but Hoango, whose captors had prudently released him, came out of the house on to the steps and signalled to his men to leave them alone. ‘At Sainte Luce!' he called out to Herr Strömli, who had already reached the gateway with the dead bodies. ‘At Sainte Luce,' Herr Strömli called back; whereupon the procession, without being pursued, passed out into the open country and reached the forest. At the seagull pond, where they found the remainder of the family, a grave was dug for the dead and many tears shed for them; and when the rings that Toni and Gustav both wore had been exchanged as a final gesture, the two lovers were lowered, amid silent prayers, into the place of their eternal rest. Five days later Herr Strömli was fortunate enough to reach Sainte Luce with his wife and his children, and there, as he had promised, he left the two negro boys behind. Entering Port-au-Prince shortly before the beginning of the siege, he fought on its ramparts for the cause of the whites; and when the city after stubborn resistance had fallen to General Dessalines, he and the French army escaped aboard ships of the British fleet; the family sailed to Europe, where without further mishap they reached their native Switzerland. There Herr Strömli settled,
using the rest of his small fortune to buy a house near the Rigi; and in the year 1807, among the bushes of his garden, one could still see the monument he had erected to the memory of his cousin Gustav, and to the faithful Toni, Gustav's bride.

When he was in the open he noticed beside his carriage a young boy who held out his hand towards him beseechingly and appeared to be in great distress. Piachi told the driver to stop, and the boy on being asked what he wanted replied in his innocence that he had caught the plague; that the sheriff's officers were pursuing him to take him to the hospital where his father and mother had already died; and he begged Piachi in the name of all the saints to let him come with him and not leave him behind to perish in the town. As he spoke he clasped the old man's hand, pressed it and kissed it and covered it with tears. Piachi, in his first impulse of horror, was about to push the boy violently away, but the latter at that very moment turned pale and fell fainting to the ground. The good old man's pity was stirred; with his son he got out of his carriage, lifted
the boy into it, and drove off, though he had not the least idea what to do with him.

At his first stop he was still negotiating with the people at the inn how he might best get rid of him again when on the orders of the police, who had got wind of the affair, he was arrested; and he and his son and the sick boy, whose name was Nicolo, were transported under guard back to Ragusa. All Piachi's remonstrances against the cruelty of this procedure were in vain; arriving at Ragusa, all three of them were taken in a bailiff's charge to the hospital; and here, although he himself remained well and the boy Nicolo recovered his health, Piachi's son, the eleven-year-old Paolo, became infected and died three days later.

The city gates were now reopened, and Piachi, having buried his son, obtained permission from the police to leave. Grief-stricken, he stepped into his carriage, and at the sight of the now empty seat beside him he took out his handkerchief to weep freely: at that moment Nicolo, cap in hand, stepped up to the carriage and wished him a good journey. Piachi leaned out, and in a voice broken by convulsive sobbing asked the boy whether he would like to travel with him. The latter had no sooner understood the old man than he nodded and answered, ‘Oh yes, indeed I should!' The hospital authorities, on being asked by the property dealer whether Nicolo might be allowed to accompany him, smiled and assured him that the boy was an orphan and would be missed by nobody. He therefore, greatly moved, lifted him into the carriage and took him back to Rome in place of his son.

On the highway outside the gates Piachi had his first good look at the boy. He was handsome in a strangely statuesque way; his black hair hung down from his forehead in simple points, overshadowing a serious, wise-looking face which never changed its expression. The old man asked him several questions, but he answered them only briefly; he sat there in the corner, uncommunicative and absorbed in himself,
with his hands in his trouser pockets, looking pensively and diffidently out of the windows of the carriage as it sped along. From time to time, with a noiseless movement, he took out a handful of nuts he was carrying with him, and while Piachi wept and wiped his eyes, the boy cracked the shells open between his teeth.

In Rome Piachi introduced him to his excellent young wife Elvira with a brief explanation of what had happened. She could not withhold bitter tears at the thought of her young stepson Paolo, whom she had loved dearly; but she embraced Nicolo, stranger though he was and stiffly as he stood before her, showed him to the bed in which Paolo had slept and gave him all the latter's clothes to wear. Piachi sent him to school where he learnt to read and write and do arithmetic. He had very understandably become all the fonder of the boy for having had to pay so high a price for him; and after only a few weeks, with the consent of the kind-hearted Elvira who had no prospects of bearing her elderly husband any other children, he adopted him as his son. Later, having dismissed from his office a clerk with whom he was for various reasons dissatisfied, he appointed Nicolo in his place, and was delighted with the active and useful assistance which the latter gave him in his complicated business affairs. The only fault that the old man, who was a sworn enemy of all bigotry, had to find with him was the company he kept with the monks of the Carmelite monastery, who were paying very friendly attentions to the boy on account of the large fortune he would one day inherit from his adoptive father; and Elvira's only criticism of Nicolo was that he seemed to have a precocious propensity for the fair sex. For at the age of fifteen he had already, while visiting these monks, succumbed to the wiles of a certain Xaviera Tartini, a concubine of the bishop's; and although on Piachi's stern insistence he broke off this liaison, Elvira had reason to believe that in these delicate matters Nicolo was not a model of self-denial. When, however, at the age of twenty he married Elvira's
niece, Constanza Parquet, an attractive young Genoese lady who had been educated in Rome under her aunt's supervision, this particular trouble at least seemed to have been cured at its source. Both his foster-parents were equally pleased with him, and to give him proof of this they drew up a splendid marriage settlement, making over to him a considerable part of their large and beautiful house. And in short, when Piachi reached the age of sixty he took for Nicolo the final step that a benefactor could take: he gave him legal possession of the entire fortune on which his property business rested, retaining only a small capital for himself, and withdrew with his faithful, virtuous Elvira, whose worldly wishes were few, into retirement.

There was in Elvira's nature an element of silent melancholy, originating in a touching episode that had occurred during her childhood. Her father, Filippo Parquet, was a well-to-do Genoese dyer, and the back of his house, designed for the exercise of his trade, stood right at the sea's edge on a massive stone embankment; huge beams, built into the gable, projected for several yards over the water and were used for hanging out the dyed material. On one ill-fated night fire broke out in the house and at once blazed up in all the rooms simultaneously as if the place were built of pitch and sulphur. The thirteen-year-old Elvira, surrounded on all sides by terrifying flames, fled from staircase to staircase and found herself, she scarcely knew how, standing on one of these beams. The poor child, hanging between heaven and earth, had no idea how to save herself: behind her the fire from the burning gable, fanned by the wind, was already eating into the beam, and beneath her was the wide, desolate, terrible sea. She was just about to commend herself to all the saints, choose the lesser of two evils, and jump down into the water, when suddenly a young Genoese of patrician family appeared in the doorway, threw his cloak over the beam, took her in his arms and with great courage and skill, by clinging to one of the damp cloths that hung down from it, lowered himself into the sea with
her. Here they were picked up by the gondolas afloat in the harbour, and carried ashore amid much acclamation from the bystanders. But it turned out that on his way through the house the gallant young man had been severely wounded on the head by a stone falling from the cornice, and it was not long before he lost consciousness and collapsed. He was carried to the house of his father, the marquis, and the latter, when he found that he was taking a long time to recover, summoned doctors from all over Italy who trepanned his son's skull repeatedly and extracted several pieces of bone; but by a mysterious dispensation of Providence all their skill was in vain. Only seldom did he show some signs of life in the presence of Elvira, who had come to nurse him at his mother's request; and after three years of very painful illness, during which the girl did not leave his bedside, he clasped her hand for one last time and expired.

Piachi, who had business connections with this young nobleman's family and made the acquaintance of Elvira in the marquis's house while she was nursing his son, married her two years later; he was particularly careful never to mention the young man's name or otherwise recall him to her, as he knew that her delicate and sensitive mind was deeply disturbed by the memory. The slightest circumstance that even remotely reminded her of the time when this youth had suffered and died for her sake always moved her to tears, and on such occasions there was no comforting or quieting her. She would at once leave whatever company she was in, and no one would follow her, for they knew by experience that the only effective remedy was to let her weep quietly by herself till her grief was stilled. No one except Piachi knew the cause of these strange and frequent fits of emotion, for never in her life had she uttered one word alluding to the episode. They were usually explained as a nervous disorder, the aftermath of a violent fever which she had contracted just after her marriage, and this account served to forestall any further inquiry into their origin.

Nicolo, who despite his father's orders had never wholly severed his connection with the above-mentioned Xaviera Tartini, had on one occasion secretly met her at the carnival, without his wife's knowledge, pretending to have been invited to a friend's house; and late that night, when everyone was asleep, he returned home in the costume of a Genoese cavalier which he chanced to have chosen. It so happened that during the night the elderly Piachi felt unwell and Elvira, since the maids were not to hand, had got out of bed to assist him and had gone to fetch a bottle of vinegar from the dining-room. She had just opened the cupboard in the corner and was standing on a chair to search among the glasses and carafes, when Nicolo softly opened the door and stepped into the dining-room in his plumed hat, with cloak and sword, carrying a candle which he had lighted in the hall. Unsuspectingly, without seeing Elvira, he crossed to his bedroom door and had just made the disconcerting discovery that it was locked, when Elvira, standing on her chair behind him with bottles and glasses in her hand, caught sight of him and immediately, as if stricken by some unseen horror, fell to the floor in a dead faint. Nicolo turned round, pale and startled, and was just about to rush to her assistance when he reflected that the noise she had made would certainly bring Piachi to the scene; being anxious to avoid the old man's reproaches at all costs, he snatched with panic haste at a bunch of keys which Elvira carried at her side, and having found one which opened his door he threw the keys back into the dining-room and vanished. Piachi, ill as he was, had jumped out of bed; he lifted up his unhappy wife and rang for the servants, who appeared with lights, and presently Nicolo too came out in his dressing-gown and asked what had happened. But Elvira, her tongue numbed by horror, could not speak, and since Nicolo was the only other person who could have cast any light on the matter, it remained an unexplained mystery. Elvira, trembling in every limb, was carried to her bed, where she lay ill for several days with an acute fever;
nevertheless she had enough natural good health to recover tolerably well, and apart from a strange depression with which it left her the incident was without consequence.

A year had thus passed when Constanza, Nicolo's wife, died in childbirth together with her first child. The loss of this virtuous and well-educated young woman was an event not only regrettable in itself but doubly so in that it gave fresh occasion for the indulgence of Nicolo's two vices; his bigotry and his passion for women. Once again he began to linger for days on end in the cells of the Carmelite monks, on the pretext of seeking consolation, although it was known that while his wife was alive he had shown her very little love or fidelity. Indeed, before Constanza had even been buried, Elvira, in the course of making arrangements for the funeral, entered Nicolo's room one evening and found him there with a girl whom, with her painted face and her fripperies, she recognized only too well as Xaviera Tartini's chambermaid. On seeing her, Elvira lowered her eyes and turned and left the room without a word to Nicolo. She said nothing to Piachi or to anyone else about this, and contented herself with kneeling down sadly by Constanza's body and weeping, for the latter had loved Nicolo passionately. But it so happened that Piachi, who had been out in the town, met the girl as he was entering the house; and well realizing what her business here had been, he accosted her sternly and induced her, half by subterfuge and half by force, to give him the letter she was carrying. He went to his room to read it and found that it was, as he had guessed, an urgent message from Nicolo to Xaviera, telling her that he longed for a meeting and asking her to appoint a time and place. Piachi sat down and, disguising his handwriting, replied in Xaviera's name: ‘Presently, before dark, at the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena'. He sealed the note with a borrowed crest and had it handed in to Nicolo's room as if it had just been delivered from the lady. The ruse was entirely successful: Nicolo immediately
took his cloak and left the house, without a thought for Constanza who was laid out in her coffin. There upon Piachi, in deep indignation, cancelled the solemn funeral which had been arranged for the following day, and summoned a few bearers to take up the laid-out corpse just as it was and carry it quietly, with only himself and Elvira and a few relatives as mourners, to the vault of Santa Maria Maddalena where it was to be buried. Nicolo, waiting wrapped in his cloak at the portico of the church, was astonished by the approach of a funeral procession composed of persons well known to him, and he asked Piachi, who was walking behind the coffin, what this meant and whom they were burying. But the old man, without looking up from the prayer book in his hand, merely answered: ‘Xaviera Tartini'; whereupon the mourners, entirely ignoring Nicolo's presence, once more uncovered the body and blessed it, and then lowered it into the tomb to be sealed away.

As a result of this deeply humiliating episode, Nicolo was filled with a burning hatred for Elvira, whom he believed to be responsible for the public disgrace which her husband had inflicted on him. For several days Piachi did not speak to him; and since Nicolo nevertheless stood in need of his favour and goodwill in connection with Constanza's estate, he was constrained to seize his adoptive father's hand one evening with every appearance of remorse and swear to give up Xaviera once and for all. He had, however, no intention of keeping this promise; on the contrary, in the face of opposition he merely became more defiant and more cunning in the art of evading the good old man's vigilance. At the same time he thought he had never seen Elvira look more beautiful than at the moment when, to his consternation, she had opened his door and closed it again at the sight of the maid. A soft flush of indignation had lent infinite charm to her gentle face which only seldom showed any emotion; and he thought it incredible that she, with so many attractions, should not herself occasionally walk the
primrose path of that indulgence for which she had just punished him so shamefully. He burned with the desire, should this turn out to be the case, to repay her in kind by informing her husband; and all he needed and sought was an opportunity for carrying out this plan.