Browning's Heroines Part 7

"Not me--to him, O G.o.d, be merciful!"

Pippa's song has, doubtlessly, saved them both, but Sebald as by direct intervention, Ottima as by the revelation of her truest self. Again, and yet again and again, we shall find in Browning this pa.s.sion for "the courage of the deed"; and we shall find that courage oftenest a.s.signed to women. For him, it was wellnigh the cardinal virtue to be brave--not always, as in Ottima, by the help of a native callousness, but a.s.suredly always, as in her and in the far dearer women, by the help of an instinctive love for truth--

"Truth is the strong thing--let man's life be true!"

Ottima's and Sebald's lives have not been "true"; but she, who can accept the retribution and feel no faintest impulse to blame and wound her lover--_she_ can rise, must rise, to heights forbidden the lame wings of him who, in his anguish, can turn and strike the fellow-creature who has but partnered him in sin. Only Pippa, pa.s.sing, could in that hour save Sebald; but by the tenderness which underlay her fierce and l.u.s.tful pa.s.sion, and which, in any later relation, some other need of the man must infallibly have called forth, Ottima would, I believe, without Pippa have saved herself. _Direct intervention_: not every soul needs that. And--whether it be intentional or not, I feel unable to decide, nor does it lose, but rather gain, in interest, if it be unintentional--one of the most remarkable things in this remarkable artistic experiment, this drama in which the scenes "have in common only the appearance of one figure," is that by each of the Four Pa.s.sings of Pippa, a man's is the soul rescued.

III. NOON: PHENE

A group of art-students is a.s.sembled at Orcana, opposite the house of Jules, a young French sculptor, who to-day at noon brings home his bride--that second Happiest One, the pale and shrouded beauty whom Pippa had seen alight at Asolo, and had envied for her immaculate girlhood.

Very eagerly the youths are awaiting this arrival; there are seven, including Schramm, the pipe-smoking mystic, and Gottlieb, a new-comer to the group, who hears the reason for their excitement, and tender-hearted and imaginative as he is, provides the human element amid the theorising of Schramm, the flippancy of most of the rest, and the fiendish malice of the painter, Lutwyche, who has a grudge against Jules, because Jules (he has been told) had described him and his intimates as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Very soon after the bridal pair shall have alighted and gone in (so Lutwyche tells Gottlieb), something remarkable will happen; it is this which they are awaiting--Lutwyche, as the moving spirit, close under the window of the studio, that he may lose no word of the antic.i.p.ated drama. But they must all keep well within call; everybody may be needed.

At noon the married pair arrive--the bridegroom radiant, his hair "half in storm and half in calm--patted down over the left temple--like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old blouse that he murders the marble in."[52:1] The bride is--"how magnificently pale!"

Most of these young men have seen her before, and always it has been her pallor which has struck them, as it struck Pippa on seeing her alight at Asolo. She is a Greek girl from Malamocco,[52:2] fourteen years old at most, "white and quiet as an apparition," with "hair like sea-moss"; her name is Phene, which, as Lutwyche explains, means sea-eagle. . . . "How magnificently pale"--and how Jules gazes on her! To Gottlieb that gaze of the young, rapturous husband is torture. "Pity--pity!" he exclaims--but he alone of them all is moved to this: Schramm, ever ready with his theories of mysticism and beauty and the immortal idealism of the soul, is unconcerned with practice--theories and his pipe bound all for Schramm; while Lutwyche is close-set as any predatory beast upon his prey; and the rank and file are but the foolish, heartless boys of all time, all place, the "students," mere and transient, who may turn into decent men as they grow older.

Well, they pa.s.s in, the bridegroom and his snowflake bride, and we pa.s.s in with them--but not, like them, forget the group that lurked and loitered about the house as they arrived.

The girl is silent as she is pale, and she is so pale that the first words her husband speaks are as the utterance of a fear awakened by her aspect--

"Do not die, Phene! I am yours now, you Are mine now; let fate reach me how she likes, If you'll not die: so, never die!"

He leads her to the one seat in his workroom, then bends over her in wors.h.i.+pping love, while she, still speechless, lifts her white face slowly to him. He lays his own upon it for an instant, then draws back to gaze again, while she still looks into his eyes, until he feels that her soul is drawing his to such communion that--

". . . I could Change into you, beloved! You by me, And I by you; this is your hand in mine, And side by side we sit: all's true. Thank G.o.d!"

But her silence is unbroken, and now he needs her voice--

"I have spoken: speak you!"

--yet though he thus claims her utterance, his own bliss drives him onward in eager speech. "O my life to come"--the life with her . . . and yet, how shall he work!

"Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth-- The live truth, pa.s.sing and re-pa.s.sing me, Sitting beside me?"

Still she is silent; he cries again "Now speak!"--but in a new access of joy accepts again that silence, for she must see the hiding-place he had contrived for her letters--in the fold of his Psyche's robe, "next her skin"; and now, which of them all will drop out first?

"Ah--this that swam down like a first moonbeam Into my world!"

In his gladness he turns to her with that first treasure in his hand.

She is not looking. . . . But there is nothing strange in that--all the rest is new to her; naturally she is more interested in the new things, and adoringly he watches her as--

". . . Again those eyes complete Their melancholy survey, sweet and slow, Of all my room holds; to return and rest On me, with pity, yet some wonder too . . ."

But pity and wonder are natural in her--is she not an angel from heaven?

Yet he would bring her a little closer to the earth she now inhabits; so--

"What gaze you at? Those? Books I told you of; Let your first word to me rejoice them too."

Eagerly he displays them, but soon reproves himself: he has shown first a tiny Greek volume, and of course Homer's should be the Greek--

"First breathed me from the lips of my Greek girl!"

So out comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must be--and _they_ will surely bring the word he increasingly longs for.

That of the "Almaign Kaiser," one day to be cast in bronze, is not worth lingering at in its present stage, but this--_this_? She will recognise this of Hippolyta--

"Naked upon her bright Numidian horse,"

for this is an imagined likeness, before he saw her, of herself. But no, it is unrecognised; so they move to the next, which she cannot mistake, for was it not done by her command? She had said he was to carve, against she came, this Greek, "feasting in Athens, as our fas.h.i.+on was,"

and she had given him many details, and he had laboured ardently to express her thought. . . . But still no word from her--no least, least word; and, tenderly, at last he reproaches her--

"But you must say a 'well' to that--say 'well'!"

--for alarm is growing in him, though he strives to think it only fantasy; she gazes too like his marble, she is too like marble in her silence--marble is indeed to him his "very life's-stuff," but now he has found "the real flesh Phene . . ." and as he rhapsodises a while, hardly able to sever this breathing vision from the wonders of his glowing stone, he turns to her afresh and beholds her whiter than before, her eyes more wide and dark, and the first fear seizes him again--

"Ah, you will die--I knew that you would die!"--

and after that, there falls a long silence.

Then she speaks. "Now the end's coming"--that is what she says for her first bridal words.

"Now the end's coming: to be sure it must Have ended some time!"

--and while he listens in the silence dreadfully transferred from her to him, the tale of Lutwyche's revenge is told at last.

We know it before Phene speaks, for Lutwyche, telling Gottlieb, has told us; but Jules must glean it from her puzzled, broken utterance, filled with allusions that mean nothing until semi-comprehension comes through the sighs of tortured soul and heart from her who still is, as it were, in a trance. And this dream-like state causes her, now and then, to say the wrong words--the words _he_ spoke--instead of those which had "cost such pains to learn . . ."

This is the story she tries to tell. Lutwyche had hated Jules for long.

There were many reasons, but the chief was that reported judgment of the "crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Greatly, and above all else, had Jules despised their dissoluteness: how could they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits which they cherished? "He could never," had said Lutwyche to Gottlieb, "be supercilious enough on that matter. . . . _He_ was not to wallow in the mire: _he_ would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with statuary." So Lutwyche had resolved that precisely "on that matter" should his malice concentrate. He happened to hear of a young Greek girl at Malamocco, "white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest." She was said to be a daughter of the "hag Natalia"--said, that is, by the hag herself to be so, but Natalia was, in plain words, a procuress. "We selected," said Lutwyche, "this girl as the heroine of our jest"; and he and his gang set to work at once. Jules received, first, a mysterious perfumed letter from somebody who had seen his work at the Academy and profoundly admired it: she would make herself known to him ere long. . . . "Paolina, my little friend of the Fenice," who could transcribe divinely, had copied this letter--"the first moonbeam!"--for Lutwyche; and she copied many more for him, the letters which Psyche, at the studio, was to keep in the fold of her robe.

In his very earliest answer, Jules had proposed marriage to the unknown writer. . . . How they had laughed! But Gottlieb, hearing, could not laugh. "I say," cried he, "you wipe off the very dew of his youth."

Schramm, however, had had his pipe forcibly taken from his mouth, and then had p.r.o.nounced that "nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world"; so, Gottlieb silenced, Lutwyche went on with the story. The letters had gone to Jules, and the answers had come from him, two, three times a day; Lutwyche himself had concocted nearly all the mysterious lady's, which had said she was in thrall to relatives, that secrecy must be observed--in short, that Jules must wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indissolubly united.

But that, when accomplished, was not the whole of Lutwyche's revenge, nor of his activity. To get the full savour of his malice, the victim must be undeceived in such a way that there could be no mistaking the hand which had struck; and this could best be achieved by writing a copy of verses which should reveal their author at the end. Nor should these be given Phene to hand Jules, for so Lutwyche would lose the delicious actual instant of the revelation. No; they should be taught her, line by line and word by word (since she could not read), and taught her by the hag Natalia, that not a subtle pang be spared the "strutting stone-squarer." Thus, listening beneath the window, Lutwyche could enjoy each word, each moan, and when Jules should burst out on them in a fury (but he must not be suffered to hurt his bride: she was too valuable a model), they would all declare, with one voice, that this was their revenge for his insults, they would shout their great shout of laughter; and, next day, Jules would depart alone--"oh, alone indubitably!"--for Rome and Florence, and they would be quits with him and his "c.o.xcombry."

That is the plan, but Phene does not know it. All she knows is that Natalia said that harm would come unless she spoke their lesson to the end. Yet, despite this threat, when Jules has fallen silent in his terror at her "whitening cheek and still dilating eyes," she feels at first that that foolish speech need not be spoken. She has forgotten half of it; she does not care now for Natalia or any of them; above all, she wants to stay where Jules' voice has lifted her, by just letting it go on. "But can it?" she asks piteously--for with that transferring of silence a change had come; the music once let fall, even Jules does not seem able to take up its life again--"no, or you would!" . . . So trust, we see, is born in her: if Jules could do what she desires, Phene knows he would. But since he cannot, they'll stay as they are--"above the world."

"Oh, you--what are you?" cries the child, who never till to-day has heard such words or seen such looks as his. But she has heard other words, seen other looks--

"The same smile girls like me are used to bear, But never men, men cannot stoop so low . . ."

Yet, watching those friends of Jules who came with the lesson she was to learn, the strangest thing of all had been to see how, speaking of him, they had used _that_ smile--

"But still Natalia said they were your friends, And they a.s.sented though they smiled the more, And all came round me--that thin Englishman With light lank hair, seemed leader of the rest; He held a paper"