Chapter I: My Italian Childhood

A quire of foolscap paper is placed before me, and I am asked to relate the principal events of an apparently eventful life.

It now strikes me for the first time how little influence even the most marked of these events had on my character. Such, for instance, as the misery of sudden poverty, the loss or gain of riches, produced but little effect or impression on my life. It was the friend and enemy, the influence of congenial companionship, or the reverse, which caused the development of my self--that selfish self which has now grown old in years, but not in feelings, for my enjoyments in this beautiful world are often keener than when I was a thoughtless and apparently gay and admired girl of sixteen.

But I should throw away this said quire of foolscap with a shudder at the fool’s-cap-fittingness of the undertaking, and leave its clean pages for some more useful object, if the history of my life were not interwoven with those I have loved better than myself, and for whose history and sufferings and joys I would gladly win the sympathy of a larger circle of friends. For friends are to be found among readers, friends who sympathize with the better portions of our nature--who can look on us with admiration and love--can love even personally unknown friends better than themselves. “Better than ourselves!” These words contain the very pith of Plato’s teachings and Socrates’ wise sayings. This was ante-Revelation religion, and I only wish that modern so-called philosophers, who foster the fatal self-sufficing religion of the day, would “show us something as good.”

My early youth was passed in Southern Italy, my mother’s home; and although my father was English and a Protestant, I was brought up in my mother’s faith, such as it was, for she happened to have lived among bad exponents of the religion. My father possessed few of the characteristics of Protestantism, and his tolerance and charity were so great that instinctively I clung more to his religion than I did to my mother’s,--or, rather, I did so after his death, which happened at the most critical period of a young Italian’s girlhood--my fourteenth year.

It was my first grief, and to my wild, ill-regulated, and irreligious nature, it became despair. For a few weeks after I was carried forcibly from his grave, I shut myself up in selfish woe, neglecting the duty of endeavouring to comfort my mother--or, rather, I did not fully believe in her sufferings, for I fancied she had never been able to appreciate his noble nature. For she was one of those indolent and uneducated Italians whose chief occupation in life seems to be the enjoyment of a _dolce far niente_, and of their own loveliness and perfect health. From the torpid stupor of despair I was at last roused by the unexpected arrival of a distant relation of my mother’s--the young Marchese Carlo Spinola. His father lived near our home at Sorrento, and from the time he first helped my baby feet to climb the orange trees, till he went to college, when I was twelve years old, I hero-worshipped him, and the dream and ambition of my childhood was to be his wife.

Of late the news which reached my father’s ears of Carlo’s career at college made him look grave, and I sometimes feared that he disapproved of the kind of childish and half joking engagement there was between us; but neither my mother nor I would believe that the handsome boy could do wrong. I afterwards learnt, many years afterwards, that his sudden return home, after two years’ absence, was caused by expulsion from the college for some grave offence.

I had never left my room since the day of my father’s funeral, and sullenly refused to accompany my mother in her solitary meals in the great state dining-room, or even in her walks by the beautiful sea-shore, in which I formerly delighted. Her old nurse Pepita attended upon me with a persevering assiduity and patience, which I sometimes half-ungratefully resented. One day I heard her running up the stairs with unusual alacrity, and bursting open the door, she called out, with a shrill glee, “Il Signor Carlo è qui, e t’aspetta nel salone!” With a cry of joy, for which I afterwards felt ashamed, I rushed down stairs, not even casting one look in the large mirror, or attempting to arrange my flowing hair and negligent attire.

He was alone in the saloon, for it was the hour of my mother’s _siesta_, and I was about to rush up to him with the impetuous glee of former childish times, when a glance at the alteration which two years had made suddenly arrested my steps. He was certainly handsomer than ever, and yet there was an indefinite something I did not like, and I half shrank from the fiery expression of his dark flashing eyes, as I strove to disengage myself from the embrace which already had frightened me by more than its former impetuous warmth.

“You no longer love me, I see; you are not even glad I’m come,” he said, as he held my head between his hands and looked into my eyes. “And you are more lovely than ever,” he continued, as he stroked my hair. And then I first became aware of my neglected attire, and felt grateful to him for his affection.

From that day I recovered all my former high spirits, and the next three months were the most wildly happy time of my early youth; for I was only fourteen, and still quite a child in mind, and very backward in learning and accomplishments.

At the end of that delightful Summer my guardian, Mr. Mordaunt, a distant relative of my father’s, arrived from England, and the misery of my education began. He was horrified to discover how little I knew, and shocked at the idle life I led with my cousin Carlo. There was an end of all our delightful rides and boating excursions along the beautiful shores; and Mr. Mordaunt seemed to have taken a most unaccountable aversion to my cousin.

He tried to persuade my mother to bring me to England, and place me at some good school in London. She could not bear the idea of leaving Italy, but consented to place me in a convent at Naples. But he shook his head, and at last, after many grave consultations, it was agreed that he should take me to Paris, and place me in a convent there.

I did not like my guardian at all, and could not help feeling much annoyed with my dear father for having thus given me up to such a tyrannical and hard-hearted man. I discovered afterwards that it was Mr. Mordaunt’s father to whom my guardianship had been left, but he died quite suddenly in Ireland, a few days before my father, and his son inherited what he seemed to think a very troublesome office.

He was not rich either, and he complained bitterly of the expensive journey he had deemed it his duty to take. Yet he was not unkind in his manner to me; he rather bored me with the reverse, and I sometimes fancied that he loved me, and was therefore jealous of my evident affection for Carlo. The latter was of course furious at the prospect of my being taken away, and he extorted from me a promise that we were to keep up a secret correspondence, and that no power on earth should prevent our marriage as soon as he became of age. This would be in two years, and in the meantime he said he should come to see me in Paris. So we parted full of hope, and I started with my guardian and Pepita, leaving my mother crying at the doorsteps, having showed more feeling at parting from me than I had believed she possessed; and I began to love her better than I had ever done before.