A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories Part 20

Though, indeed, why should a lady of thirty, and from an obscure country town, hesitate to be enamored of any eligible suitor who presented himself in Venice? It is not my duty to enter upon a detail or summary of Carlotta's character or condition, or to do more than indicate that, while she did not greatly excel in youth, good looks, or worldly gear, she had yet a little property, and was of that soft prettiness which is often more effective than downright beauty. There was, indeed, something very charming about her; and, if she was a blonde, I have no reason to think she was as fickle as the Venetian proverb paints that complexion of woman; or that she had not every quality which would have excused any one but Tonelli for thinking of marrying her.

After their first mute interview in the Piazza, the two lost no time in making each other's acquaintance; but though the affair was vigorously conducted, no one could say that it was not perfectly in order. Tonelli on the following day, which chanced to be Sunday, repaired to St. Mark's at the hour of the fas.h.i.+onable ma.s.s, where he gazed steadfastly at the lady during her orisons, and whence, at a discreet distance, he followed her home to the house of the friends whom she was visiting. Somewhat to his discomfiture at first, these proved to be old acquaintances of his; and when he came at night to walk up and down under their balconies, as bound in true love to do, they made nothing of asking him indoors, and presenting him to his lady. But the pair were not to be entirely balked of their romance, and they still arranged stolen interviews at church, where one furtively whispered word had the value of whole hours of unrestricted converse under the roof of their friends. They quite refused to take advantage of their anomalously easy relations, beyond inquiry on his part as to the amount of the lady's dower, and on hers as to the permanence of Tonelli's employment. He in due form had Pennellini to his confidant, and Carlotta unbosomed herself to her hostess; and the affair was thus conducted with such secrecy that not more than two thirds of Tonelli's acquaintance knew anything about it when their engagement was announced.

There were now no circ.u.mstances to prevent their early union, yet the happy conclusion was one to which Tonelli urged himself after many secret and bitter displeasures of spirit. I am persuaded that his love for Carlotta must have been most ardent and sincere, for there was everything in his history and reason against marriage. He could not disown that he had hitherto led a joyous and careless life, or that he was exactly fitted for the modest delights, the discreet variety, of his present state,--for his daily routine at the notary's, his dinner at the Bronze Horses or the cook-shop, his hour at the caffe, his walks and excursions, for his holiday banquet with the Cenarotti, and his formal promenade with the ladies of that family upon the Molo. He had a good employment, with a salary that held him above want, and afforded him the small luxuries already named; and he had fixed habits of work and of relaxation, which made both a blessing. He had his chosen circle of intimate equals, who regarded him for his good-heartedness and wit and foibles; and his little following of humble admirers, who looked upon him as a gifted man in disgrace with fortune. His friends.h.i.+ps were as old as they were secure and cordial; he was established in the kindliness of all who knew him; and he was flattered by the dependence of the Paronsina and her mother, even when it was troublesome to him.

He had his past of sentiment and war, his present of story-telling and romance. He was quite independent: his sins, if he had any, began and ended in himself, for none was united to him so closely as to be hurt by them; and he was far too imprudent a man to be taken for an example by any one. He came and went as he listed, he did this or that without question. With no heart chosen yet from the world of woman's love, he was still a young man, with hopes and affections as pliable as a boy's.

He had, in a word, that reputation of good-fellow which in Venice gives a man the t.i.tle of _buon diavolo_, but on which he does not anywhere turn his back with impunity, either from his own consciousness or from public opinion. There never was such a thing in the world as both good devil and good husband; and even with his betrothal Tonelli felt that his old, careless, merry life of the hour ended, and that he had tacitly recognized a future while he was yet unable to cut the past. If one has for twenty years made a jest of women, however amiably and insincerely, one does not propose to marry a woman without making a jest of one's self. The avenging remembrance of elderly people whose late matrimony had furnished food for Tonelli's wit now rose up to torment him, and in his morbid fancy the merriment he had caused was echoed back in his own derision.

It shocked him to find how quickly his secret took wing, and it annoyed him that all his acquaintances were so prompt to felicitate him. He imagined a latent mockery in their speeches, and he took them with an argumentative solemnity. He reasoned separately with his friends; to all who spoke to him of his marriage he presented elaborate proofs that it was the wisest thing he could possibly do, and tried to give the affair a cold air of prudence. "You see, I am getting old; that is to say, I am tired of this bachelor life in which I have no one to take care of me, if I fall sick, and to watch that the doctors do not put me to death. My pay is very little, but, with Carlotta's dower well invested, we shall both together live better than either of us lives alone. She is a careful woman, and will keep me neat and comfortable. She is not so young as some women I had thought to marry,--no, but so much the better; n.o.body will think her half so charming as I do, and at my time of life that is a great point gained. She is good, and has an admirable disposition. She is not spoiled by Venice, but as innocent as a dove. O, I shall find myself very well with her!"

This was the speech which with slight modification Tonelli made over and over again to all his friends but Pennellini. To him he unmasked, and said boldly that at last he was really in love; and being gently discouraged in what seemed his folly, and incredulously laughed at, he grew angry, and gave such proofs of his sincerity that Pennellini was convinced, and owned to himself, "This madman is actually enamored,--enamored,--like a cat! Patience! What will ever those Cenarotti say?"

In a little while poor Tonelli lost the philosophic mind with which he had at first received the congratulations of his friends, and, from reasoning with them, fell to resenting their good wishes. Very little things irritated him, and pleasantries which he had taken in excellent part, time out of mind, now raised his anger. His barber had for many years been in the habit of saying, as he applied the stick of fixature to Tonelli's mustache, and gave it a jaunty upward curl, "Now we will bestow that little dash of youthfulness"; and it both amazed and hurt him to have Tonelli respond with a fierce "Tsit!" and say that this jest was proper in its antiquity to the times of Romulus rather than our own period, and so go out of the shop without that "Adieu, old fellow,"

which he had never failed to give in twenty years. "Capperi!" said the barber, when he emerged from a profound revery into which this outbreak had plunged him, and in which he had remained holding the nose of his next customer, and tweaking it to and fro in the violence of his emotions, regardless of those mumbled maledictions which the lather would not permit the victim to articulate. "If Tonelli is so savage in his betrothal, we must wait for his marriage to tame him. I am sorry. He was always such a good devil."

But if many things annoyed Tonelli, there were some that deeply wounded him, and chiefly the fact that his betrothal seemed to have fixed an impa.s.sable gulf of years between him and all those young men whose company he loved so well. He had really a boy's heart, and he had consorted with them because he felt himself nearer their age than his own. Hitherto they had in no wise found his presence a restraint. They had always laughed, and told their loves, and spoken their young men's thoughts, and made their young men's jokes, without fear or shame, before the merry-hearted sage, who never offered good advice, if indeed he ever dreamed that there was a wiser philosophy than theirs. It had been as if he were the youngest among them; but now, in spite of all that he or they could do, he seemed suddenly and irretrievably aged.

They looked at him strangely, as if for the first time they saw that his mustache was gray, that his brow was not smooth like theirs, that there were crow's-feet at the corners of his kindly eyes. They could not phrase the vague feeling that haunted their hearts, or they would have said that Tonelli, in offering to marry, had voluntarily turned his back upon his youth; that love, which would only have brought a richer bloom to their age, had breathed away forever the autumnal blossom of his.

Something of this made itself felt in Tonelli's own consciousness, whenever he met them, and he soon grew to avoid these comrades of his youth. It was therefore after a purely accidental encounter with one of them, and as he was pa.s.sing into the Campo Sant' Angelo, head down, and supporting himself with an inexplicable sense of infirmity upon the cane he was wont so jauntily to flourish, that he heard himself addressed with, "I say, master!" He looked up, and beheld the fat madman who patrols that campo, and who has the license of his affliction to utter insolences to whomsoever he will, leaning against the door of a tobacconist's shop, with his arms folded, and a lazy, mischievous smile loitering down on his greasy face. As he caught Tonelli's eye he nodded, "Eh! I have heard, master"; while the idlers of that neighborhood, who relished and repeated his incoherent pleasantries like the _mots_ of some great diner-out, gathered near with expectant grins. Had Tonelli been altogether himself, as in other days, he would have been far too wise to answer, "What hast thou heard, poor animal?"

"That you are going to take a mate when most birds think of flying away," said the madman. "Because it has been summer a long time with you, master, you think it will never be winter. Look out: the wolf doesn't eat the season."

The poor fool in these words seemed to utter a public voice of disapprobation and derision; and as the pitiless bystanders, who had many a time laughed with Tonelli, now laughed at him, joining in the applause which the madman himself led off, the miserable good devil walked away with a s.h.i.+ver, as if the weather had actually turned cold.

It was not till he found himself in Carlotta's presence that the long summer appeared to return to him. Indeed, in her tenderness and his real love for her he won back all his youth again; and he found it of a truer and sweeter quality than he had known even when his years were few, while the gay old-bachelor life he had long led seemed to him a period of miserable loneliness and decrepitude. Mirrored in her fond eyes, he saw himself alert and handsome; and, since for the time being they were to each other all the world, we may be sure there was nothing in the world then to vex or shame Tonelli. The promises of the future, too, seemed not improbable of fulfilment, for they were not extravagant promises. These people's castle in the air was a house furnished from Carlotta's modest portion, and situated in a quarter of the city not too far from the Piazza, and convenient to a decent caffe, from which they could order a lemonade or a cup of coffee for visitors. Tonelli's stipend was to pay the housekeeping, as well as the minute wage of a servant-girl from the country; and it was believed that they could save enough from that, and a little of Carlotta's money at interest, to go sometimes to the Malibran theatre or the Marionette, or even make an excursion to the mainland upon a holiday; but if they could not, it was certainly better Italianism to stay at home; and at least they could always walk to the Public Gardens. At one time, religious differences threatened to cloud this blissful vision of the future; but it was finally agreed that Carlotta should go to ma.s.s and confession as often as she liked, and should not tease Tonelli about his soul; while he, on his part, was not to speak ill of the pope except as a temporal prince, or of any of the priesthood except of the Jesuits when in company, in order to show that marriage had not made him a _codino_. For the like reason, no change was to be made in his custom of praising Garibaldi and reviling the accursed Germans upon all safe occasions.

As Tonelli had nothing in the world but his salary and his slender wardrobe, Carlotta eagerly accepted the idea of a loss of family property during the revolution. Of Tonelli's scar she was as proud as Tonelli himself.

When she came to speak of the acquaintance of all those young men, it seemed again like a breath from the north to her betrothed; and he answered, with a sigh, that this was an affair that had already finished itself. "I have long thought them too boyish for me," he said, "and I shall keep none of them but Pennellini, who is even older than I,--who, I believe, was never born, but created middle-aged out of the dust of the earth, like Adam. He is not a good devil, but he has every good quality."

While he thus praised his friend, Tonelli was meditating a service, which when he asked it of Pennellini, had almost the effect to destroy their ancient amity. This was no less than the composition of those wedding-verses, without which, printed and exposed to view in all the shop-windows, no one in Venice feels himself adequately and truly married. Pennellini had never willingly made a verse in his life; and it was long before he understood Tonelli, when he urged the delicate request. Then in vain he protested, recalcitrated. It was all an offence to Tonelli's morbid soul, already irritated by his friend's obtuseness, and eager to turn even the reluctance of nature into insult. He took his refusal for a sign that he, too, deserted him; and must be called back, after bidding Pennellini adieu, to hear the only condition on which the accursed sonnet would be furnished, namely, that it should not be signed Pennellini, but An Affectionate Friend. Never was sonnet cost poet so great anguish as this: Pennellini went at it conscientiously as if it were a problem in mathematics; he refreshed his prosody, he turned over Carrer, he toiled a whole night, and in due time appeared as Tonelli's affectionate friend in all the butchers' and bakers' windows. But it had been too much to ask of him, and for a while he felt the shock of Tonelli's unreason and excess so much that there was a decided coolness between them.

This important particular arranged, little remained for Tonelli to do but to come to that open understanding with the Paronsina and her mother which he had long dreaded and avoided. He could not conceal from himself that his marriage was a kind of desertion of the two dear friends so dependent upon his singleness, and he considered the case of the Paronsina with a real remorse. If his meditated act sometimes appeared to him a gross inconsistency and a satire upon all his former life, he had still consoled himself with the truth of his pa.s.sion, and had found love its own apology and comfort; but in its relation to these lonely women, his love itself had no fairer aspect than that of treason, and he shrank from owning it before them with a sense of guilt. Some wild dreams of reconciling his future with his past occasionally haunted him; but in his saner moments, he perceived their folly. Carlotta, he knew, was good and patient, but she was nevertheless a woman, and she would never consent that he should be to the Cenarotti all that he had been; these ladies also were very kind and reasonable, but they too were women, and incapable of accepting a less perfect devotion. Indeed, was not his proposed marriage too much like taking her only son from the signora and giving the Paronsina a stepmother? It was worse, and so the ladies of the notary's family viewed it, cheris.h.i.+ng a resentment that grew with Tonelli's delay to deal frankly with them; while Carlotta, on her part, was wounded that these old friends should ignore his future wife so utterly. On both sides evil was stored up.

When Tonelli would still make a show of fidelity to the Paronsina and her mother, they accepted his awkward advances, the latter with a cold visage, the former with a sarcastic face and tongue. He had managed particularly ill with the Paronsina, who, having no romance of her own, would possibly have come to enjoy the autumnal poetry of his love if he had permitted. But when she first approached him on the subject of those rumors she had heard, and treated them with a natural derision, as involving the most absurd and preposterous ideas, he, instead of suffering her jests, and then turning her interest to his favor, resented them, and closed his heart and its secret against her. What could she do, thereafter, but feign to avoid the subject, and adroitly touch it with constant, invisible stings? Alas! it did not need that she should ever speak to Tonelli with the wicked intent she did; at this time he would have taken ill whatever most innocent thing she said. When friends are to be estranged, they do not require a cause. They have but to doubt one another, and no forced forbearance or kindness between them can do aught but confirm their alienation. This is on the whole fortunate, for in this manner neither feels to blame for the broken friends.h.i.+p, and each can declare with perfect truth that he did all he could to maintain it. Tonelli said to himself, "If the Paronsina had treated the affair properly at first!" and the Paronsina thought, "If he had told me frankly about it to begin with!" Both had a latent heartache over their trouble, and both a sense of loss the more bitter because it was of loss still unacknowledged.

As the day fixed for Tonelli's wedding drew near, the rumor of it came to the Cenarotti from all their acquaintance. But when people spoke to them of it, as of something they must be fully and particularly informed of, the signora answered coldly, "It seems that we have not merited Tonelli's confidence"; and the Paronsina received the gossip with an air of clearly affected surprise, and a "_Davvero!_" that at least discomfited the tale-bearers.

The consciousness of the unworthy part he was acting toward these ladies had come at last to poison the pleasure of Tonelli's wooing, even in Carlotta's presence; yet I suppose he would still have let his wedding-day come and go, and been married beyond hope of atonement, so loath was he to inflict upon himself and them the pain of an explanation, if one day, within a week of that time, the notary had not bade his clerk dine with him on the morrow. It was a holiday, and as Carlotta was at home, making ready for the marriage, Tonelli consented to take his place at the table from which he had been a long time absent. But it turned out such a frigid and melancholy banquet as never was known before. The old notary, to whom all things came dimly, finally missed the accustomed warmth of Tonelli's fun, and said, with a little s.h.i.+ver, "Why, what ails you, Tonelli? You are as moody as a man in love."

The notary had been told several times of Tonelli's affair, but it was his characteristic not to remember any gossip later than that of 'Forty-eight.

The Paronsina burst into a laugh full of the cruelty and insult of a woman's long-smothered sense of injury. "Caro nonno," she screamed into her grandfather's dull ear, "he is really in despair how to support his happiness. He is shy, even of his old friends,--he has had so little experience. It is the first love of a young man. Bisogna compatire la gioventu, caro nonno." And her tongue being finally loosed, the Paronsina broke into incoherent mockeries, that hurt more from their purpose than their point, and gave no one greater pain than herself.

Tonelli sat sad and perfectly mute under the infliction, but he said in his heart, "I have merited worse."

At first the signora remained quite aghast; but when she collected herself, she called out peremptorily, "Madamigella, you push the affair a little beyond. Cease!"

The Paronsina, having said all she desired, ceased, panting.

The old notary, for whose slow sense all but her first words had been too quick, though all had been spoken at him, said dryly, turning to Tonelli, "I imagine that my deafness is not always a misfortune."

It was by an inexplicable, but hardly less inevitable, violence to the inclinations of each that, after this miserable dinner, the signora, the Paronsina, and Tonelli should go forth together for their wonted promenade on the Molo. Use, which is the second, is also very often the stronger nature, and so these parted friends made a last show of union and harmony. In nothing had their amity been more fatally broken than in this careful homage to its forms; and now, as they walked up and down in the moonlight, they were of the saddest kind of apparitions,--not mere disembodied spirits, which, however, are bad enough, but disanimated bodies, which are far worse, and of which people are not more afraid only because they go about in society so commonly. As on many and many another night of summers past, the moon came up and stood over the Lido, striking far across the glittering lagoon, and everywhere winning the flattered eye to the dark ma.s.ses of shadow upon the water; to the trees of the Gardens, to the trees and towers and domes of the cloistered and templed isles. Scene of pensive and incomparable loveliness! giving even to the stranger, in some faint and most unequal fas.h.i.+on, a sense of the awful meaning of exile to the Venetian, who in all other lands in the world is doubly an alien, from their unutterable unlikeness to his sole and beautiful city. The prospect had that pathetic unreality to the friends which natural things always a.s.sume to people playing a part, and I imagine that they saw it not more substantial than it appears to the exile in his dreams. In their promenade they met again and again the unknown, wonted faces; they even encountered some acquaintances, whom they greeted, and with whom they chatted for a while; and when at nine the bronze giants beat the hour upon their bell,--with as remote effect as if they were giants of the times before the flood,--they were aware of Pennellini, promptly appearing like an exact and methodical spectre.

But to-night the Paronsina, who had made the scene no compliments, did not insist as usual upon the ice at Florian's; and Pennellini took his formal leave of the friends under the arch of the Clock Tower, and they walked silently homeward through the echoing Merceria.

At the notary's gate Tonelli would have said good-night, but the signora made him enter with them, and then abruptly left him standing with the Paronsina in the gallery, while she was heard hurrying away to her own apartment. She reappeared, extending toward Tonelli both hands, upon which glittered and glittered manifold skeins of the delicate chain of Venice.

She had a very stately and impressive bearing, as she stood there in the moonlight, and addressed him with a collected voice. "Tonelli," she said, "I think you have treated your oldest and best friends very cruelly. Was it not enough that you should take yourself from us, but you must also forbid our hearts to follow you even in sympathy and good wishes? I had almost thought to say adieu forever to-night; but," she continued, with a breaking utterance, and pa.s.sing tenderly to the familiar form of address, "I cannot part so with thee. Thou hast been too like a son to me, too like a brother to my poor Clarice. Maybe thou no longer lovest us, yet I think thou wilt not disdain this gift for thy wife. Take it, Tonelli, if not for our sake, perhaps then for the sake of sorrows that in times past we have shared together in this unhappy Venice."

Here the signora ended perforce the speech, which had been long for her, and the Paronsina burst into a pa.s.sion of weeping,--not more at her mamma's words than out of self-pity and from the national sensibility.

Tonelli took the chain, and reverently kissed it and the hands that gave it. He had a helpless sense of the injustice the signora's words and the Paronsina's tears did him; he knew that they put him with feminine excess further in the wrong than even his own weakness had; but he tried to express nothing of this,--it was but part of the miserable maze in which his life was involved. With what courage he might he owned his error, but protested his faithful friends.h.i.+p, and poured out all his troubles,--his love for Carlotta, his regret for them, his shame and remorse for himself. They forgave him, and there was everything in their words and will to restore their old friends.h.i.+p, and keep it; and when the gate with a loud clang closed upon Tonelli, going from them, they all felt that it had irrevocably perished.

I do not say that there was not always a decent and affectionate bearing on the part of the Paronsina and her mother towards Tonelli and his wife; I acknowledge that it was but too careful and faultless a tenderness, ever conscious of its own fragility. Far more natural was the satisfaction they took in the delayed fruitfulness of Tonelli's marriage, and then in the fact that his child was a girl, and not a boy.

It was but human that they should doubt his happiness, and that the signora should always say, when hard pressed with questions upon the matter: "Yes, Tonelli is married; but if it were to do again, I think he would do it to-morrow rather than to-day."

THE END.