Browning's Heroines Part 2

--for just as the body is struck dumb, as it were, when some monstrous engine of torture is directed upon it, so was her soul for one moment.

But only for one moment. For instantly another knight strode out--Count Gismond. She had never seen him face to face before, but now, so beholding him, she knew that she was saved. He walked up to Gauthier and gave him the lie in his throat, then struck him on the mouth with the back of a hand, so that the blood flowed from it--

". . . North, South, East, West, I looked. The lie was dead And d.a.m.ned, and truth stood up instead."

Recalling it now, with her friend Adela, she mused a moment; then said how her gladdest memory of that hour was that never for an instant had she felt any doubt of the event.

"G.o.d took that on him--I was bid Watch Gismond for my part: I did.

Did I not watch him while he let His armourer just brace his greaves, Rivet his hauberk, on the fret The while! His foot . . . my memory leaves No least stamp out, nor how anon He pulled his ringing gauntlets on."

Before the trumpet's peal had died, the false knight lay, "p.r.o.ne as his lie," upon the ground; and Gismond flew at him, and drove his sword into the breast--

"Cleaving till out the truth he clove.

Which done, he dragged him to my feet And said 'Here die, but end thy breath In full confession, lest thou fleet From my first, to G.o.d's second death!

Say, hast thou lied?' And, 'I have lied To G.o.d and her,' he said, and died."

Then Gismond knelt and said to her words which even to this dear friend she could not repeat. She sank on his breast--

"Over my head his arm he flung Against the world . . ."

--and then and there the two walked forth, amid the shouting mult.i.tude, never more to return. "And so they were married, and lived happy ever after."

Gaiety, courage, trust: in this nameless Browning heroine we find the characteristic marks. On that birthday morning, almost her greatest joy was in the sense of her cousins' love--

"I thought they loved me, did me grace To please themselves; 'twas all their deed"

--and never a thought of their jealousy had entered her mind. Both were beautiful--

". . . Each a queen By virtue of her brow and breast; Not needing to be crowned, I mean, As I do. E'en when I was dressed, Had either of them spoke, instead Of glancing sideways with still head!

But no: they let me laugh and sing My birthday-song quite through . . ."

and so, all trust and gaiety, she had gone down arm-in-arm with them, and taken her state on the "foolish throne," while everybody applauded her. Then had come the moment when Gauthier stalked forth; and from the older mind, now pondering on that infamy, a flash of bitter scorn darts forth--

"Count Gauthier, when he chose his post, Chose time and place and company To suit it . . ."

for with sad experience--"knowledge of the world"--to aid her, she can see that the whole must have been pre-concerted--

"And doubtlessly ere he could draw All points to one, he must have schemed!"

Her trust in the swiftly emerging champion and lover is comprehensible to us of a later day--that, and the joy she feels in watching him impatiently submit to be armed. Even so might one of us watch and listen to and keep for ever in memory the stamp of the foot, the sound of the "ringing gauntlets"--reproduced as that must be for modern maids in some less heartening music! But, as the tale proceeds, we lose our sense of sisterhood; we realise that this girl belongs to a different age. When Gauthier's breast is torn open, when he is dragged to her feet to die, she knows not any shrinking nor compa.s.sion--can apprehend each word in the dialogue between slayer and slain--can, over the bleeding body, receive the avowal of his love who but now has killed his fellow-man like a dog--and, gathered to Gismond's breast, can, unmoved by all repulsion, feel herself smeared by the dripping sword that hangs beside him. . . . All this we women of a later day have "resigned"--and I know not if that word be the right one or the wrong; so many lessons have we conned since Gismond fought for a slandered maiden. We have learned that lies refute themselves, that "things come right in the end," that human life is sacred, that a woman's chast.i.ty may be sacred too, but is not her most inestimable possession--and, if it were, should be "able to take care of itself." Further doctrines, though not yet fully accepted, are being pa.s.sionately taught: such, for example, as that Man--male Man--is the least protective of animals.

"Over my head his arm he flung Against the world . . ."

I think we can see the princess, as she spoke those words, aglow and tremulous like the throbbing fingers in the Northern skies. Well, the "Northern Lights" recur, in our lat.i.tudes, at unexpected moments, at long intervals; but they do recur.

One thing vexes, yet solaces, me in this tale of Count Gismond. The Countess, telling Adela the story, has reached the crucial moment of Gauthier's insult when, choked by tears as we saw, she stops speaking.

While still she struggles with her sob, she sees, at the gate, her husband with his two boys, and at once is able to go on. She finishes the tale, prays a perfunctory prayer for Gauthier; then speaks of her sons, in both of whom, adoring wife that she is, she must declare a likeness to the father--

"Our elder boy has got the clear Great brow; tho' when his brother's black Full eye shows scorn, it . . ."

With that "it" she breaks off; for Gismond has come up to talk with her and Adela. The first words we hear her speak to that loved husband are--fibbing words! The broken line is finished thus--

". . . Gismond here?

And have you brought my tercel back?

I just was telling Adela How many birds it struck since May."

We, who have temporarily lost so many things, have at least gained this one--that we should not think it necessary to tell that fib. We should say nothing of what we had been "telling Adela." And some of us, perhaps, would reject the false rhyme as well as the false words.

II

"PIPPA Pa.s.sES"

I. DAWN: PIPPA

The whole of Pippa is emotion. She "pa.s.ses" alone through the drama, except for one moment--only indirectly shown us--in which she speaks with some girls by the way. She does nothing, is nothing, but exquisite emotion uttering itself in song--quick lyrical outbursts from her joyous child's heart. The happiness-in-herself which this poor silk-winder possesses is something deeper than the gaiety of which I earlier spoke.

Gay she can be, and is, but the spell that all unwittingly she exercises, derives from the profounder depth of which the Eastern poet thought when he said that "We ourselves are Heaven and h.e.l.l." . . .

Innocent but not ignorant, patient, yet capable of a hearty little grumble at her lot, Pippa is "human to the red-ripe of the heart." She can threaten fictively her holiday, if it should ill-use her by bringing rain to spoil her enjoyment; but even this intimidation is of the very spirit of confiding love, for her threat is that if rain does fall, she will be sorrowful and depressed, instead of joyous and exhilarated, for the rest of the year during which she will be bound to her "wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil." Such a possibility, thinks Pippa's trustful heart, must surely be enough to cajole the weather into beauty and serenity.

It is New Year's Day, and sole holiday in all the twelve-month for silk-winders in the mills of Asolo. An oddly chosen time, one thinks--the short, cold festival! And it is notable that Browning, though he acquiesces in the fictive date, yet conveys to us, so definitely that it must be with intention, the effect of summer weather.

We find ourselves all through imagining mellow warmth and suns.h.i.+ne; nay, he puts into Pippa's mouth, as she antic.i.p.ates the treasured outing, this lovely and a.s.suredly not Janiverian forecast--

"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing. . . ."

Is it not plain from this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry fact? For "blue" the hours of New Year's Day may be in Italy, but as "_long_ blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. I maintain that, whatever it may be called, it is really Midsummer's Day on which Pippa pa.s.ses from Asolo through Orcana and Possagno, and back to Asolo again.

We see her first as she springs out of bed with the dawn's earliest touch on her "large mean airy chamber" at Asolo[24:1]--the lovely little town of Northern Italy which Browning loved so well. In that chamber, made vivid to our imagination by virtue of three consummately placed adjectives (note the position of "mean"), Pippa prepares for her one external happiness in the year.

"Oh Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee, A mite of my twelve hours' treasure, The least of thy gazes or glances,

One of thy choices or one of thy chances,