Browning's Heroines Part 4

So the first dream is over.

"Love, love, love--there's better love, I know!"

--and the next pretending shall "defy the scoffer"; it shall be the love of Jules and Phene--

"Why should I not be the bride as soon As Ottima?"

Moreover, last night she had seen the stranger-girl arrive--"if you call it seeing her," for it had been the merest momentary glimpse--

". . . one flash Of the pale snow-pure cheek and black bright tresses, Blacker than all except the black eyelash; I wonder she contrives those lids no dresses, So strict was she the veil Should cover close her pale Pure cheeks--a bride to look at and scarce touch, Scarce touch, remember, Jules! For are not such Used to be tended, flower-like, every feature, As if one's breath would fray the lily of a creature?

How will she ever grant her Jules a bliss So startling as her real first infant kiss?

Oh, no--not envy, this!"

For, recalling the virgin dimness of that apparition, the slender gamut of that exquisite reserve, the little work-girl has a moment's pang of pity for herself, who has to trip along the streets "all but naked to the knee."

"Whiteness in us were wonderful indeed,"

she cries, who is pure gold if not pure whiteness, and in an instant shows herself to be at any rate pure innocence. It could not be envy, she argues, which pierced her as she thought of that immaculate girlhood--

". . . for if you gave me Leave to take or to refuse, In earnest, do you think I'd choose That sort of new love to enslave me?

Mine should have lapped me round from the beginning; As little fear of losing it as winning: Lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives, And only parents' love can last our lives."

And she turns, thus rejecting the new love, to the "Son and Mother, gentle pair," who commune at evening in the turret: what prevents her being Luigi?

"Let me be Luigi! If I only knew What was my mother's face--my father, too!"

For Pippa has never seen either, knows not who either was, nor whence each came. And just because, thus ignorant, she cannot truly figure to herself such love, she now rejects in turn this third pretending--

"Nay, if you come to that, best love of all Is G.o.d's;"

--and she will be Monsignor! To-night he will bless the home of his dead brother, and G.o.d will bless in turn

"That heart which beats, those eyes which mildly burn With love for all men! I, to-night at least, Would be that holy and beloved priest."

Now all the weighing of love with love is over; she has chosen, and already has the proof of having chosen rightly, already seems to share in G.o.d's love, for there comes back to memory an ancient New-Year's hymn--

"All service ranks the same with G.o.d."

No one can work on this earth except as G.o.d wills--

". . . G.o.d's puppets, best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first."

And we must not talk of "small events": none exceeds another in greatness. . . .

The revelation has come to her. Not Ottima nor Phene, not Luigi and his mother, not even the holy and beloved priest, ranks higher in G.o.d's eyes than she, the little work-girl--

"I will pa.s.s each, and see their happiness, And envy none--being just as great, no doubt, Useful to men, and dear to G.o.d, as they!"

And so, laughing at herself once more because she cares "so mightily"

for her one day, but still insistent that the sun shall s.h.i.+ne, she sketches her outing--

"Down the gra.s.s path grey with dew, Under the pine-wood, blind with boughs, Where the swallow never flew, Nor yet cicala dared carouse, No, dared carouse--"

But breaks off, breathless, in the singing for which through the whole region she is famed, leaves the "large mean airy chamber," enters the little street of Asolo--and begins her Day.

II. MORNING: OTTIMA

In the shrub-house on the hill-side are Ottima, the wife of Luca, and her German lover, Sebald. He is wildly singing and drinking; to him it still seems night. But Ottima sees a "blood-red beam through the shutter's c.h.i.n.k," which proves that morning is come. Let him open the lattice and see! He goes to open it, and no movement can he make but vexes her, as he gropes his way where the "tall, naked geraniums straggle"; pushes the lattice, which is behind a frame, so awkwardly that a shower of dust falls on her; fumbles at the slide-bolt, till she exclaims that "of course it catches!" At last he succeeds in getting the window opened, and her only direct acknowledgment is to ask him if she "shall find him something else to spoil." But this imperious petulance, curiously as it contrasts with the patience which, a little later, she will display, is native to Ottima; she is not the victim of her nerves this morning, though now she pa.s.ses without transition to a mood of sensuous cajolement--

"Kiss and be friends, my Sebald! Is't full morning?

Oh, don't speak, then!"

--but Sebald does speak, for in this aversion from the light of day he recognises a trait of hers which long has troubled him.

With _his_ first words we perceive that "nerves" are uppermost, that the song and drink of the opening moment were bravado--that Sebald, in short, is close on a breakdown. He turns upon her with a gibe against her ever-shuttered windows. Though it is she who now has ordered the unwelcome light to be admitted, he overlooks this in his enervation, and says how, before ever they met, he had observed that her windows were always blind till noon. The rest of the little world of Asolo would be active in the day's employment; but her house "would ope no eye." "And wisely," he adds bitterly--

"And wisely; you were plotting one thing there, Nature, another outside. I looked up-- Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars, Silent as death, blind in a flood of light; Oh, I remember!--and the peasants laughed And said, 'The old man sleeps with the young wife.'

This house was his, this chair, this window--his."

The last line gives us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This house _was_ his. . . ." But Ottima, whether from scorn of Sebald's mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of anguish not at all. She gazes from the open lattice: "How clear the morning is--she can see St. Mark's! Padua, blue Padua, is plain enough, but where lies Vicenza? They shall find it, by following her finger that points at Padua. . . ."

Sebald cannot emulate this detachment. Morning seems to him "a night with a sun added"; neither dew nor freshness can he feel; nothing is altered with this dawn--the plant he bruised in getting through the lattice last night droops as it did then, and still there shows his elbow's mark on the dusty sill.

She flashes out one instant. "Oh, shut the lattice, pray!"

No: he will lean forth--

". . . I cannot scent blood here, Foul as the morn may be."

But his mood s.h.i.+fts quickly as her own--

". . . There, shut the world out!

How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse The world and all outside!"

and at last he faces her, literally and figuratively, with a wild appeal to let the truth stand forth between them--

". . . Let us throw off This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let's out With all of it."

But no. Her instinct is never to speak of it, while his drives him to "speak again and yet again," for only so, he feels, will words "cease to be more than words." _His blood_, for instance--

". . . let those two words mean 'His blood'; And nothing more. Notice, I'll say them now: 'His blood.' . . ."

She answers with phrases, the things that madden him--she speaks of "the deed," and at once he breaks out again. _The deed_, and _the event_, and _their pa.s.sion's fruit_--