BRINGETH THIS TRUE STORY TO AN END.
Ye who have traced the pilgrim to the scene
Which is his last, if in your memories dwell
A thought that once was his, if on ye swell
A single recollection, not in vain
He wore his sandal shoon and scallop-shell.
BYRON.
Having related the story of my life as it happened, incident by incident, and brought it down to that point at which stories are wont to end, I find that I have little to add respecting others. My narrative from first to last has been purely personal. The one love of my life was Hortense--the one friend of my life, Oscar Dalrymple. The catalogue of my acquaintances would scarcely number so many names as I have fingers on one hand. The two first are still mine; the latter, having been brought forward only in so far as they re-acted upon my feelings or modified my experiences, have become, for the most part, mere memories, and so vanish, ghost-like, from the page. Franz Müller is studying in Rome, having carried off a prize at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, which entitles him to three years at the Villa Medici, that Ultima Thule of the French art-student's ambition. I hear that he is as full of whim and jest as ever, and the very life of the Café Greco. May I some day hear his pleasant laugh again! Dr. Chéron, I believe, is still practising in Paris; and Monsieur de Simoncourt, I have no doubt, continues to exercise the profession of Chevalier d'Industrie, with such failures and successes as are incidental to that career.
As for my early amourettes, they have disappeared from my path as utterly as though they had never crossed it. Of Madame de Marignan, I have neither heard, nor desired to hear, more. Even Josephine's pretty face is fast fading from my memory. It is ever thus with the transient passions of our première jeunesse. We believe in them for the moment, and waste laughter and tears, chaplets and sackcloth, upon them. Presently the delusion passes; the earnest heart within us is awakened; and we know that till now we have been mere actors in "a masquerade of dreams." The chaplets were woven of artificial flowers. The funeral was a mock funeral--the banquet a stage feast of painted fruits and empty goblets! Alas! we cannot undo that foolish past. We may only hope to blot it out with after records of high, and wise, and tender things. Thus it is that the young man's heart is like the precious palimpsest of old. He first of all defiles it with idle anacreontics in praise of love and wine; but, erasing these by-and-by with his own pious hand, he writes it over afresh with chronicles of a pure and holy passion, and dedicates it to the fair saint of all his orisons.
Dalrymple and his wife are now settled in Italy, having purchased a villa in the neighborhood of Spezzia, where they live in great retirement. In their choice of such retirement they are influenced by more than one good reason. In the first place, the death of the Vicomte de Caylus was an event likely to be productive of many unpleasant consequences to one who had deprived the French government of so distinguished an officer. In the next, Dalrymple is a poor man, and his wife is no longer rich; so that Italy agrees with their means as well as with their tastes. Lastly, they love each other so well that they never weary of their solitude, nor care to barter away their blue Italian skies and solemn pine-woods for the glittering unrest of society.
Fascinated by Dalrymple's description of his villa and the life he led in it, Hortense and I made up our minds some few weeks after our marriage, to visit that part of Italy--perhaps, in case we were much pleased with it, to settle there, for at least a few years. So I prepared once more to leave my father's house; this time to let it, for I knew that I should never live in it again.
It took some weeks to clear the old place out. The thing was necessary; yet I felt as if it were a kind of sacrilege. To disturb the old dust upon the library-shelves and select such books as I cared to keep; to sort and destroy all kinds of hoarded papers; to ransack desks that had never been unlocked since the hands that last closed them were laid to rest for ever, constituted my share of the work. Hortense superintended the rest. As for the household goods, we resolved to keep nothing, save a few old family portraits and my father's plate, some of which had descended to us through two or three centuries.
While yet in this unsettled state, with the house all in confusion and the time appointed for our journey drawing nearer and nearer day by day, a strange thing happened.
At the end of the garden, encroaching partly upon a corner of it, and opening into the lane that bounded it on the other side of the hedge, stood the stable belonging to the house.
It had been put to no use since my father's time, and was now so thoroughly out of repair that I resolved to have it pulled down and rebuilt before letting it to strangers. In the meantime, I went down there one morning with a workman before the work of demolition was begun.
We had some difficulty to get in, for the lock and hinges were rusted, and the floor within was choked with fallen rubbish. At length we forced an entrance. I thought I had never seen a more dreary interior. My father's old chaise was yet standing there, with both wheels off. The mouldy harness was dropping to pieces on the walls. The beams were festooned with cobwebs. The very ladder leading to the loft above was so rotten that I scarcely dared trust to it for a footing.
Having trusted to it, however, I found myself in a still more ruinous and dreary hole. The posts supporting the roof were insecure; the tiles were all displaced overhead; and the rafters showed black and bare against the sky in many places. In one corner lay a heap of mouldy straw, and at the farther end, seen dimly through the darkness, a pile of old lumber, and--by Heaven! the pagoda-canopy of many colors, and the little Chevalier's Conjuring Table!
I could scarcely believe my eyes. My poor Hortense! Here, at last, were some relics of her father; but found in how strange a place, and by how strange a chance!
I had them dragged out into the light, all mildewed and cob-webbed as they were; whereupon an army of spiders rushed out in every direction, a bat rose up, shrieking, and whirled in blind circles overhead. In a corner of the pagoda we found an empty bird's-nest. The table was small, and could be got out without much difficulty; so I helped the workman to carry it down the ladder, and sending it on before me to the house, sauntered back through the glancing shadows of the acacia-leaves, musing upon the way in which these long-forgotten things had been brought to light, and wondering how they came to be stored away in my own stable.
"Do you know anything about it, Collins?" I said, coming up suddenly behind him in the hall.
"About what, sir?" asked that respectable servant, looking round with some perplexity, as if in search of the nominative.
I pointed to the table, now being carried into the dismantled dining-room.
Collins smiled--he had a remarkably civil, apologetic way of smiling behind his hand, as if it were a yawn or a liberty.
"Oh, sir," said he, "don't you remember? To be sure, you were quite a young gentleman at that time--but---"
"But what?" I interrupted, impatiently.
"Why, sir, that table once belonged to a poor little conjuring chap who called himself Almond Pudding, and died...."
I checked him with a gesture.
"I know all that," I said, hastily. "I remember it perfectly; but how came the things into my stable?"
"Your respected father and my honored master, sir, had them conveyed there when the Red Lion was sold off," said Collins, with a sidelong glance at the dining-room door. "He was of opinion, sir, that they might some day identify the poor man to his relatives, in case of inquiry."
I heard the sound of a suppressed sob, and, brushing past him without another word, went in and closed the door.
"My own Hortense!" I said, taking her into my arms. "My wife!"
Pale and tearful, she lifted her face from my shoulder, and pointed to the table.
"I know what it is," she faltered. "You need not tell me. My heart tells me!"
I led her to a chair, and explained how and where it had been found. I even told her of the little empty nest from which the young birds had long since flown away. In this tiny incident there was something pathetic that soothed her; so, presently, when she left off weeping, we examined the table together.
It was a quaint, fragile, ricketty thing, with slender twisted legs of black wood, and a cloth-covered top that had once been green, but now retained no vestige of its original color. This cloth top was covered with slender slits of various shapes and sizes, round, square, sexagonal, and so forth, which, being pressed with the finger, fell inwards and disclosed little hiding-places sunk in the well of the table; but which, as soon as the pressure was removed, flew up again by means of concealed springs, and closed as neatly as before.
"This is strange," said Hortense, peering into one of the recesses. "I have found something in the table! Look--it is a watch!"
I snatched it from her, and carried it to the window. Blackened and discolored as it was, I recognised it instantly.
It was my own watch--my own watch of which I was so boyishly vain years and years ago, and which I had lost so unaccountably on the night of the Chevalier's performance! There were my initials engraved on the back, amid a forest of flourishes, and there on the dial was that identical little Cupid with the cornucopia of flowers, which I once thought such a miracle of workmanship! Alas! what a mighty march old Time had stolen upon me, while that little watch was standing still!
"Oh, Heaven!--oh, husband!"
Startled from my reverie more by the tone than the words, I turned and saw Hortense with a packet of papers in her hand--old, yellow, dusty papers, tied together with a piece of black ribbon.
"I found them there--there--there!" she faltered, pointing to a drawer in the table which I now saw for the first time. "I chanced to press that little knob, and the drawer flew out. Oh, my dear father!--see, Basil, here are his patents of nobility--here is the certificate of my birth--here are the title-deeds of the manor of Sainte Aulaire! This alone was wanted to complete our happiness!"
"We will keep the table, Hortense, all our lives!" I explained, when the first agitation was past.
"As sacredly," replied she, "as it kept this precious secret!"
My task is done. Here on my desk lies the piled-up manuscript which has been my companion through so many pleasant hours. Those hours are over now. I may lay down my pen, and put aside the whispering vine-leaves from my casement, and lean out into the sweet Italian afternoon, as idly as though I wore to the climate and the manner born.
The world to-day is only half awake. The little white town, crouched down by the "beached margent" of the bay, winks with its glittering windows and dozes in the sunshine. The very cicalas are silent. The fishermen's barques, with their wing-like sails all folded to rest, rock lazily at anchor, like sea-birds asleep. The cork-trees nod languidly to each other; and not even yonder far-away marble peaks are more motionless than that cloud which hangs like a white banner in the sky. Hush! I can almost believe that I hear the drowsy washing of the tide against the ruined tower on the beach.
And this is the bay of Spezzia--the lovely, treacherous bay of Spezzia, where our English Shelley lost his gentle life! How blue those cruel waters are to-day! Bluer, by Heaven! than the sky, with scarce a ripple setting to the shore.
We are very happy in our remote Italian home. It stands high upon a hill-side, and looks down over a slope of silvery olives to the sea. Vineyard and orange grove, white town, blue bay, and amber sands lie mapped out beneath our feet. Not a felucca "to Spezzia bound from Cape Circella" can sail past without our observation.
"Not a sun can die, nor yet be born, unseen
By dwellers at my villa."
Nay, from this very window, one might almost pitch an orange into the empty vettura standing in the courtyard of the Croce di Malta!
Then we have a garden--a wild, uncultured place, where figs and lemons, olives "blackening sullen ripe," and prickly aloes flourish in rank profusion, side by side; and a loggia, where we sit at twilight drinking our Chianti wine and listening to the nightingales; and a study looking out on the bay through a trellis of vine-leaves, where we read and write together, surrounded by our books. Here, also, just opposite my desk, hangs Müller's copy of that portrait of the Marquise de Sainte Aulaire, which I once gave to Hortense, and which is now my own again. How often I pause upon the unturned page, how often lay my pen aside, to look from the painting to the dear, living face beneath it! For there she sits, day after day, my wife! my poet! with the side-light falling on her hair, and the warm sea-breezes stirring the soft folds of her dress. Sometimes she lifts her eyes, those wondrous eyes, luminous from within "with the light of the rising soul"--and then we talk awhile of our work, or of our love, believing ever that
"Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work."
Perhaps the original of that same painting in the study may yet be ours some day, with the old château in which it hangs, and all the broad lands belonging thereunto. Our claim has been put forward some time now, and our lawyers are confident of success. Shall we be happier, if that success is ours? Can rank add one grace, or wealth one pleasure, to a life which is already so perfect? I think not, and there are moments when I almost wish that we may never have it in our power to test the question.
But stay! the hours fly past. The sun is low, and the tender Italian twilight will soon close in. Then, when the moon rises, we shall sail out upon the bay in our own tiny felucca; or perhaps go down through the town to that white villa gleaming out above the dark tops of yonder cypresses, and spend some pleasant hours with Dalrymple and his wife. They, too, are very happy; but their happiness is of an older date than ours, and tends to other ends. They have bought lands in the neighborhood, which they cultivate; and they have children whom they adore. To educate these little ones for the wide world lying beyond that blue bay and the far-off mountains, is the one joy, the one care of their lives. Truly has it been said that
"A happy family
Is but an earlier heaven."