Chapter XXXII: After Two Years

"Heart, thou must learn to do without--
That is the riches of the poor;
Their liberty is to endure;
Wrap thou thy old cloak thee about,
And carol loud, and carol stout!
* * * * *
Why should'st thou only wear no clout?
Thou only walk in love-robes pure?
Thy step alone be firm and sure?
Thou only free of fortune's flout?--
Nay, nay! but learn to go without,
And so be humbly, richly poor."
_A Threefold Cord._

The bright spring sunshine was streaming into a sitting-room in the Lafayette at Philadelphia, and Nita's sweet, clear soprano woke the echoes with that most charming of songs, "_Caro nome_." Carlo, who from the first had constituted himself her accompanyist at her daily practice, was seated at the piano, and something in the faces of both brother and sister showed plainly that time had passed. Two years had gone by since Carlo had rejoined the Company at Brighton, and spite of excessively hard work--spite of the weary day and night journeys, with too often an exhausting performance at the end of them--his healthy, vigorous nature had asserted itself, and all signs of delicacy of chest had disappeared, while further cultivation, and increasing physical strength, had rendered his voice more than ever notable. The daily round of work had been monotonous enough, and yet the second and third years of his professional life had certainly seemed far shorter to him than the first had done. But then nothing flies so fast as fully occupied time, especially when no very important events come to interrupt the routine. And nothing had happened worthy of note in these two years. Comerio's vengeance had not as yet taken effect--he had not followed them to America; and scarcely any changes had been made in the Company. Mademoiselle de Caisne had, indeed, gone back to Italy, finding it impossible to make the slightest impression on the new baritone: her place had been filled by a very young American girl. It seemed probable, too, that Sardoni and Domenica Borelli would not remain very much longer in the troupe. They had now been betrothed for several months, and were to be married in New York before Merlino's Company sailed for Italy, which they expected to do towards the end of May. Carlo hardly knew how to face the thought of life without his two best friends, but their contracts with Merlino both expired in the following autumn, and he could not but admit that their married life would probably be much happier if they carried out Sardoni's idea, and settled down in London, where they might both hope to gain a fair livelihood by teaching, eked out by occasional engagements. But, though little had happened, the general tone of the Company had certainly been raised; the Impresario had become a trifle less rough and overbearing; Nita, though she was still as far as ever from being a happy wife, seemed to rebel less bitterly against her lot; while Carlo's character had grown and developed as a man's character does develop when he is trying incessantly to live the highest life.

As he played the accompaniment of "_Caro nome_," his thoughts involuntarily turned to Francesca, and he began to wonder whether Sardoni would soon come back from his walk and whether he would have remembered to call at the post-office for letters. It was possible that he might to-day hear from Enrico, and he was terribly hungry for news, for Clare, with the best of intentions, was too busy to write very often, and when she did write could only give him second-hand reports, while Enrico was as far as ever from understanding the sort of details for which a lover craves.

He looked up eagerly as the door opened and Sardoni entered.

"Did you remember the letters?" he asked, glad that the song should have ended at such an opportune moment.

"For a wonder, yes," replied Sardoni, who since his engagement to Domenica had been ludicrously absent-minded. "But there were none for you, Val, only one for Madame Merlino."

Carlo was sadly disappointed, but yet was so well used to disappointment that by the time he had played through a few bars of "_Caro nome_" his face had resumed its usual expression.

Sardoni left the room again, and Nita, throwing herself back in a rocking-chair, began to read her letter. As she read, an uncontrollable exclamation of surprise escaped her. Carlo, who was turning over the pages of _Rigoletto_ and still whistling the air of "_Caro nome_," looked up quickly.

"Is anything the matter?" he asked, and as he spoke he noticed for the first time the big letters of the "Napoli" post-mark.

She read on without answering, but something in her face roused a nameless fear in his heart; did the letter concern Comerio? The handwriting was not Enrico's or his fears would have been instantly aroused; he would have imagined that some evil must have befallen Francesca--some evil which his friend did not dare to tell him abruptly and without preparation. But that fear was not awakened. It must, then, surely be connected with Comerio, this Italian letter! If only she would speak and put him out of his suspense!

He sat down near her and waited, not wishing to force himself upon her in any way; and at length she looked up and, with a strange tone in her voice, said, "I have heard from Mlle. de Caisne, Carlo. You had better read her letter, and she encloses these."

In some surprise he took the papers she handed to him, and glanced at the first. It was a half-sheet of paper, on the back of which the following words were written in Italian, "An advertisement cut out of the _Times_." Neatly pasted on the other side were a few brief lines of English print,--"On the 26th inst., at Naples, by the British Consul and by the Rev. J. Smith, RENATO, CONTE CAROSSA, to FRANCESCA, elder daughter of Captain JOHN BRITTON, R.N."

Carlo neither spoke nor moved; the blow struck at his heart had been so fearfully sudden that after the first moment of agony he felt nothing, but was like one paralyzed. Still holding the advertisement in his hand, he stared at those words which had shattered his whole life; then, as sensation slowly returned, a horrible craving to know more seized him, and he snatched up the next paper. It was a leaflet printed in silver, an English wedding-hymn, beginning, "The voice that breathed o'er Eden;" he read it through from beginning to end with a sort of blank, dazed feeling. Then he took the next slip. It was a cutting from the _Roma_, just a short paragraph stating that the marriage of Count Carossa had called forth general attention, owing to the fact that his bride was the acknowledged _belle_ of Naples. That the beautiful English girl had made a charming bride, and that according to the English custom the wedding party had been entertained at breakfast after the ceremony at Casa Bella, the residence of Captain Britton.

Lastly, he read with feverish haste Mlle. de Caisne's letter, rushing impatiently through the preliminaries till he came to the following remark,--"The marriage of Count Carossa is the great topic of the day here, and knowing how intimate you and your brother were with the English owners of Casa Bella, I send you full particulars. The wedding was really a beautiful sight, the bride wore a dress of ivory-white satin with a very long train; and it really is wonderful how even in this climate English girls seem to preserve their complexion. Miss Britton's is the most charmingly delicate coloring I ever saw. Every one is envious of Count Carossa. I only hope he deserves so fascinating a wife."

Carlo folded the papers and put them back in their envelope. Every vestige of color had left his face, and Nita began to wonder whether he would ever move or speak again--he looked as if he had been turned to stone. She was frightened, and yet the sight did not appeal to her, it even made her a little angry and impatient, for she had not heart enough to understand him.

There was a long, burdened silence, broken at length by Nita.

"Well," she said, with a bitter tone in her voice; "now, at any rate, you will know what it means to have a legal bar between you and the one you love."

At this his stony despair suddenly changed, the frozen blood seemed to boil in his veins, and a look of anguish, which terrified her, dawned in his eyes. Her words had most cruelly, most recklessly, thrust the terrible truth before him. He got up quickly, and walked with unsteady steps to the door, by a sort of blind instinct perceiving that to be away from his sister would be a relief.

But Nita had no sooner spoken than she regretted her words, and would have given anything to recall them. She rushed after him and caught his hand in hers.

"Don't go, Carlo!" she cried. "I am sorry I said that--I am sorry for you. Carlino! Stay!"

Her presence was almost more than he could endure, but though past thinking definitely of anything but the crushing blow he had received and the torturing pain it caused him, the mere habit of considering others before himself made him pause now, though he longed sorely to be alone with his trouble.

"Ah, why should we have such things to bear?" she cried passionately, thinking even now far more of her own trouble than of his.

"God help us both!" he groaned.

Then, dropping her hand, he turned away and flung himself face downwards on the couch, unable to resist any longer the paroxysm of grief which overwhelmed him.

Nita watched him much as Kate Britton had watched him in the hut; her woman's soul was touched to the quick, and though only a minute before she had cried, "Why should we have such things to bear?" she saw now, with a sharp pang of regret, that Carlo's grief was the direct consequence of her own weakness. She fell down on her knees beside him.

"Carlino!" she sobbed, "forgive me--forgive me! It is I who have brought it all on you."

He did not look up or speak, but put out his hand for hers and held it fast in a grasp that seemed to burn her. She thought he grew calmer and ventured to speak again, longing to awaken his pity for her own case.

"Don't you see now, Carlo, that you have been expecting too much of me?" she pleaded. "Oh, don't you see now how all those ideas of yours are in practice impossible?"

Her last word, emphatically spoken, seemed to fill him with strength. In an instant he was on his feet, while she still knelt on, looking up at him in awe and astonishment. Somehow it seemed to her that she was face to face with the perfection of manhood.

"Nothing is impossible!" he said.

And the words seemed to ring and pulsate in her ears as no words had ever done before.

She cowered down and hid her face, trembling before the first divine revelation which had ever come home to her innermost heart. It was a relief to her when she heard him leave the room, but the pitifulness of the story overcame her again; the love, so far beyond any love of which she herself was yet capable, had at length touched her heart, and she sobbed for grief and pity.

"Why,--oh why," she thought, with bitter regret, "did I not from the first resist the evil thoughts that came? It must have been possible for me, too!"

In the meantime Carlo had locked himself into his own room, and there, pacing to and fro, looked his sorrow in the face like a man. Thousands, as he was well aware, must have been called to bear the same thing before, but yet there were circumstances which made his case doubly hard; the utter want of preparation, the dearth of all but the most public accounts of the marriage, the knowledge that of his own free will he had left Francesca and gone out into the world. For eight long years he had loved her, and though there had been grief, and trouble, and separation for them, yet he had been sure of her love through all, and had been free to lavish on her his heart's devotion. But now in one moment all was ended between them, and the thought of his love, which, in spite of the separation, had been an unfailing solace to him through these weary years of public life, was now only a torture, a peril. There would be no beautiful reality, all his own, to which he could come back when the day's work was over, as to some sacred and safe retreat; she was now the wife of another, and he must no longer think of her as his betrothed. His safe retreat had become a place of torment. He saw that life would be one long battle, and that the best he could hope for after long conflict, was so far to subdue himself that he should dare to meet her as a friend; be able, perhaps, to serve her in some faint, far-off way; be at least able to carry a brave front, and cast no shadow on her wedded happiness.

But was she happy? Had she, perhaps, been forced to acquiesce, in obedience to her father's wishes? Count Carossa might well prove an importunate suitor, and decline to accept as final her first refusal. Had she been forced against her will to accept him? Or had he really won her heart; and did she now see that the past was but a girlish dream, evanescent, and not wholly sweet? He hardly knew which of these possibilities pained him most; he glanced now at one, now at the other, till the misery of ignorance and suspense almost maddened him. And then, with a pang of the worst pain he had yet felt a horrible new idea shot through his mind.

There was that vile slander which had been set on foot two years ago, and which still inevitably worked its poisonous way, growing more dangerous with age, as slanders do. Francesca had heard the first rumors, Enrico had told him as much, she herself at Merlebank had half hinted something of the sort. At first she had indignantly refused to credit them, but when the tale was in every one's mouth, why then her very innocence and ignorance of the world would surely make her credit them the more easily; and how ready the Captain would be to believe anything of the sort touching an operatic singer, he realized only too bitterly. More and more as he thought of it this seemed to him the only explanation of the marriage. He could not believe that anything else could possibly have robbed him of Francesca's love. But if all around her believed him to be not only guilty of such a sin, but to be such a contemptible hypocrite as to have sought his own pleasure under the cover of protecting his sister, might she not possibly have been induced to believe the slander too? And, once believed, such a story must inevitably kill love. For a while he sat rapt in the miserable contemplation of this thought, then suddenly his mind revolted from the idea of any kind of distrust in Francesca. No, it was not possible! She would believe in him against the whole world, would love him for ever, not for any merit in himself, but because of the truth, and purity, and beauty of her own nature. She had been coerced into the marriage with Count Carossa. Again he fell back into the weary round of surmises, rejecting each in turn, but always confronted by the terrible realization that, however the marriage had been brought about, it was a fact,--a fact which gave the death-blow to his hope, and doomed him to go through life alone.

For he must go on living, and must face the thought at once. Indeed, into his simple, healthy mind no thought of death had entered, though most truly life looked to him desolate enough; but it is in times of great trouble that a good man's real character is tested, and every dull, monotonous day of work in Merlino's Company had added something to his manly steadfastness, and gave him power now to go straight on and do his duty without flinching. He brought back his thoughts with an effort to the present,--_Rigoletto_ that evening, the necessity of dining at once, the fear lest his trouble should at all mar the happiness of Sardoni and Domenica, his best friends, and a resolution to keep the news from them if possible till their wedding was over. With this thought in his mind he turned to the glass, saw that trouble was very legibly stamped on his face, and resolved to dine alone at some restaurant, that he might escape observation. On the staircase he met Anita, she looked up at him in a scared way.

"Do not speak of this to any one else," he said, in a low voice; "above all, not to Sardoni or Domenica. Let it be only between us two, at any rate till after the wedding."

She promised, although she was far from understanding the motives which prompted the request, and Carlo with a heavy heart passed on, and walked slowly down Broad Street. He remembered, as he walked, the sense of horrible loneliness which had seized him when he walked back from the Strada Nuova to Palazzo Forti, after the _Pilgrim_ had sailed from Naples; but that suffering had been light indeed compared to what he was called to bear to-day. It seemed to him now that he was alive and yet dead, that the outer shell of everyday existence would go on in a mechanical way, just as if nothing had happened, but that the heart had been destroyed, and that nothing could ever bring it back to vitality.

In a sort of dream of pain he watched the passers-by, and wondered whether in their careless talk they, too, might be robbing some one of his reputation, and doing the devil's work in the world. A feeling of strong resentment rose up in his mind, he walked more quickly, the color came back to his face, and his hot, southern blood began to burn and tingle in his veins; if he could have been suddenly confronted by the unknown being who had set on foot this slander he could have killed him, at least so in his hot indignation he fancied.

Once more Nita's bitter words rang in his ears:--"A legal bar between you and the one you love."

"After all," urged the tempter, "are you not aiming at the impossible? Why should you think of her as his wife when the thought tortures you? What! you mean to allow no thought that you could not lay bare to her sight, or the sight of her husband? Fool! Give up! Is such love as yours to be cramped, and fettered, and starved; love that has lasted all these years?"

"You'll forgive me making bold to stop you, sir," said a familiar voice. He looked round and saw Adamson, the scene-shifter. "I wanted to catch you alone, sir, and at the theatre there be always others within hearing; and I guessed you'd be glad to hear, sir, that it's all come right."

The sudden reaction from the terrible temptation to the story of the honest-looking old man, who had been one of his first friends in the troupe, taxed his powers to the utmost. His brain seemed to reel, but with an effort he dragged himself back to the recollection of Adamson's trouble. His daughter, a pretty American girl, sang soprano in the chorus, and for some time her father had been very uneasy about her, and Carlo had watched with a good deal of interest the progress of a small drama in which his dresser, Sebastiano, played the part of lover.

"It's all come right, sir," repeated Adamson; "and it's all owing to you. I don't know what you've done to Sebastiano, sir, but he's kind o' altered. They're a going to git married right away!"

The need of giving the old man his hearty sympathy restored Carlo to himself. He went into a restaurant and ate his dinner soberly, but in his dark sky there were two gleams of light: the first was the recollection that Nita's heart had been at length reached; the second, that his hopes for Sebastiano had been fulfilled. There came to him, too, the perception that there was still one way in which he might safely serve Francesca. He could pray that her marriage might be a happy one. There was at least that still to be hoped for.

He went back to the Lafayette, found a letter which he had written earlier in the day to Enrico, and added the following brief postscript:--

"Why did you tell me nothing of Count Carossa's marriage? Send me all the particulars, if you can, to New York."

More than that he could not bring himself to put even to his friend, but to Clare he wrote a long letter and poured out all his trouble, for she was a woman, and he knew she would understand. Then, relieved a little by this, he took the letters himself to the post, and made his way to the theatre. In Locust Street, close to the stage-door, he met Sardoni, who was much too full of his own affairs to be very observant.

"The day is fixed at last," he said, cheerfully; "it is to be at New York next Sunday week. Will you be my best man, old fellow?"

"Of course I will, Jack, if you wish it," said Carlo. "Does your father come out for the wedding?"

"No; but he has asked us to stay with him in the autumn, and your letter has evidently done a good deal towards reconciling him to the notion. We owe everything to you, Val."

Carlo turned into his dressing-room, only to be confronted by Sebastiano. He had heard too much of marriages that day, but yet must congratulate his dresser, and, as he put on his jester's costume of red and yellow motley, must listen to the story old Adamson had told him, all over again.

"Why, signor!" exclaimed Sebastiano when he had finished his tale, "see! You have put the red stocking on the left leg instead of the yellow one! One might think that you were in my case!"

Carlo smiled good-naturedly, congratulated the dresser again and dismissed him; but when he was alone he bowed his head on his hands and sat for a long time motionless, overwhelmed by a sense of utter desolation. What was there left to him? Well, there was a certain increasing fame. But, after all, what was that? Success was sweet, and yet in a way it did but make him feel his loneliness the more. Often enough the tears would start to his eyes when he read glowing praise of his artistic work, because he could not help thinking how such things would have pleased his mother. The chief worth of all such recognition is the pleasure it gives to those who love us, and he now stood practically alone in the world; success and fame would be his, but neither father nor mother, neither wife nor child, would be present with him to make them seem worth while.

The voice of the call-boy roused him from his sad thoughts. He wrung his hands together.

"My God, help me!" he groaned.

Then taking up his jester's cap with its gold coxcomb, he made his way to the wings and was soon transformed into the malicious, mocking Rigoletto, playing the part with his customary skill, and receiving with his usual quiet modesty the thunder of applause which rewarded him.