Part 4, Chapter XXIX.
No Good at All.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
That same Sunday afternoon Signor Mattei walked slowly into Caletto, and seeking the lodging where he knew that his daughters were staying sat down under the verandah, with the feelings of a man who has come to a period in his life from which he sees no particular means of progress. Rosa and Violante were out, and he rested after the hot walk he had taken from the point where the nearest public conveyance stopped, and thought over the events of the last few weeks.
Things had gone wrong—his highest hopes were destroyed, and his more moderate comforts and expectations had shared in their fall. He was angry with Violante, and as he sat waiting for her blamed her in his heart for their misfortunes, in a way that would have been intensely cruel and selfish had he cared what became of himself. But he did not cherish an unforgiving resentment against her because she could no longer make their fortune and her own, but because she had lost the career that he so honoured. He would not have forgiven her could she have brought him riches gained in another way; but, though she had disappointed the man’s high ideal and not his self-interest, the disappointment recoiled just as hardly on her.
Signor Vasari had insulted and dismissed him, “esteeming his own private grudge better than his orchestra, where he cannot supply my place,” thought Signor Mattei, with a contempt that almost neutralised his mortification. “Who can play the violin solos as I can?” he thought proudly. “But old Naldi at Florence understands real genius—could I go and leave the girls alone? Rosa has unparalleled discretion and Violante will have no lovers now. Eccola! She is coming.”
Violante came round the corner of the house and started with a surprise not altogether delightful. However, reminding herself that she could be in no disgrace now, she ran up to him and kissed him.
“Ah, padre mio! How hot and tired you look. You have come to see us? Rosa will be here directly; she is with Madame Cellini. I will get you some melon; that will be cool and nice.”
Her livelier manner, her more blooming looks, were evident at a glance, as she ran into the house and brought out a slice of melon and then a glass of light wine.
“Is it good?” she said, with smiling earnestness. “I will take your bat and stick.”
“You look well—have you tried your voice?” he said abruptly.
“No, father;” answered Violante, with a sudden droop into her old timid self and falling into silence.
“It must surely be returning—in a few weeks.”
“Father, there is Rosa,” interrupted Violante hastily, as her sister and Madame Cellini came up the path.
Signor Mattei assumed a less anxious air; he was sufficiently in awe of Rosa not to wish her to find him reverting to the forbidden subject; and he came in and drank chocolate, which was now provided, and allowed himself to be made comfortable after his journey. Violante fell into the background, leaving Rosa to make the communication of their uncle’s letter. Madame Cellini, willing to give them an opportunity for their discussion, strolled away to look at the sunset, and Rosa handed the letter to her father, leaving it to tell its own story. The little tawny children peeped at Violante from a distance, and showed her the kid with vine-leaves round its horns; but she shook her head at them, and sat down demurely in the window, with a sort of good-child air herself, to listen to her father’s decision.
Signor Mattei had never shown any jealousy of his daughter’s English relations. He loved his wife’s memory; and, though his brother-in-law’s mode of life would have been totally uncongenial to him and it was well that they never met, he rather liked to talk of “the uncle—of the highest respectability—who could command the London musical world,” a power which would much have astonished Mr Grey himself; and the fact that Rosa, coming from this uncle, had been prepared to like her home life had greatly tended to obviate any uncomfortable feelings. Besides, to put it plainly, he wanted just now to get rid of his daughters, and their uncle’s proposal was exceedingly convenient to him.
“It has come,” he said, rather sentimentally, “to help our fallen fortunes. Now, with you in the lap of luxury, I can bend to the storm and suffer hardships willingly.”
Violante looked distressed, but Rosa answered:
“We do not wish to be idle wherever we are, and should always come to you when you wanted us. But as my pupils seem to be dispersed, and they have behaved so ill to you at the opera, some change seems desirable.”
“Assuredly, Rosina,—assuredly. Make yourself easy; anything will do for me.”
“But, father, what shall you do?” said Rosa—not very uneasily, for she knew from her father’s manner that he had schemes in view.
“I?—I shall take my staff in my hand and make my way to Florence. Old Naldi, my friend there, is a true musician.”
“And you will get an engagement at the opera there?” said Rosa.
“Yes, yes, it may be so; and next spring, perhaps, an opening in London: I am not unknown there.”
“That would suit exactly,” said Rosa.
“If by that time I had found employment in London, and Violante—Violante! ah, she is no good at all,” said Signor Mattei, mournfully—“she can do nothing.”
“I will go to school and learn,” said Violante, her voice choking.
“Ah, foolish child! there is but one moment in life when success is possible: pass that—pass all! You threw your chance away—it is over.”
The words fell on Violante’s ears with a double sense: she hid her face in her hands, and ran out of the room, down through the olive trees, towards the lake. “Over for ever!”—and she but seventeen. Was she never to have another chance,—another love?
“Ah, never! never!” she cried, half aloud, as the sleeping passion, lulled by the passiveness of her recovery and by her easy life, woke suddenly in all its force. “I had better die, for it is all over for me! Ah, Hugo,—Hugo mio! ah!”
The last cry dropped into startled commonplace as the branch of a tree caught her long muslin dress, and tore it right across, while she almost lost her footing with the shock.
“All, signorina, take care; you’ll hurt yourself,” said an unexpected voice; and “Signor Arthur” caught her by the hand and began to disentangle the unlucky dress.
“Dear me, I’m afraid it’s a good deal damaged,” he said, good-naturedly; “you should not run so fast.”
“I was—unhappy: so I did not see,” said Violante, simply.
The unhappiness was obvious, for Violante’s eyes were wet and her voice trembling. Yet Arthur could hardly help smiling at the utterly un-English confession. He thought she could only so have acknowledged some very childish sorrow.
“What makes you so unhappy?” he said, with equal directness.
“Because,” she answered, telling half a truth, “because my father is here, and I have lost my voice, signor; and he says I shall never have another chance in my life. All is gone in that one.”
Mistaken as Arthur was as to the facts of her story, he had heard enough to supplement her words; and the kindly impulse of consolation prompted him to say:
“Oh, no, you must not think that. There must be a great deal left in your life yet, and in England you can begin fresh. Perhaps your voice will get strong again there.”
“Ah, that may be,” said Violante, without any answering smile.
“Anyway, one must do the best one can and not vex other people,” he said, with a glance at a letter he held in his hand. Violante’s eyes followed his, but she only saw the bit of folded paper, little knowing that the mere sight of the writer’s name would have burst into her depression like a storm into mountain mist, and would have brought the past and the present together again; while Arthur went on, ignorant of how much vivid, unreasonable happiness he could with a few words have given to the creature he was trying so kindly to console. For even to hear of all Hugh’s recent troubles would have been better than not to hear of him at all; and the few reserved, incommunicative lines which had just disappointed Arthur would have seemed like a message from. Paradise.
“All sorts of pleasant things may come to you in England; so keep up a good heart, signorina.”
“Keep up a good heart,” repeated Violante, as if the expression was not quite familiar to her.
“Yes; don’t be frightened, you know, and never say die.”
Violante smiled now. The bright voice and look did put some heart into her; and Arthur, who had merely talked in the most cheering way he could think of, without considering, as Hugh would have done in like case, whether he had himself proved the truth of his words, felt all the brighter for his success.
“These are very unpeaceful olive-branches to have torn your dress so badly,” he said, after a pause, to turn her attention.
“Ah, yes; but I think I should like to keep a bit of them to remind me of keeping a good heart, and of never saying die,” said Violante, and the words sounded inexpressibly droll in her soft, lingering foreign accent. Arthur broke off a little piece and gave it to her.
“I might do the same,” he said. “I’m sure I need the motto.”
And so unconscious and so uncoquettish was Violante’s way that Arthur actually dropped the olive-leaves into his pocket-book without thinking of smiling at her proposal. “There,” he said, “we will remember.”
“I will try,” said Violante; “and there is Rosa. She will say it is late. Good night, Signor Arthur!”
“Good night!”
Violante repeated the advice, and showed her olive-leaves to her sister; but, though Rosa held her tongue by a great effort of discretion, Signor Arthur, on thinking over the transaction, was not very much surprised to find that he obtained no more private interviews with Violante. Perhaps Rosa was somewhat astonished that he did not seek any.
She had, however, much to occupy her in the arrangements for their journey. Signor Mattei, who was very far from selfish in practical matters, was quite ready to assign a sufficient portion of the money recently earned by Violante and himself to take his daughters respectably to England; and the whole party soon returned to Civita Bella to make preparations. Their small stock of furniture was to be sold, the ready-money being much more valuable to them. Violante tried to induce Rosa to pack up the china bowl among their private possessions, but Rosa refused steadily and a little harshly. She did not mean the old life to cling round her sister still.
“Give it to Maddalena,” she said. “We will not sell it, since you care so much.”
So Violante went to the old woman, whose grief at parting was, perhaps, really the most pathetic part of this break-up of home, and bid her keep the bowl “for her sake.”
“Ecco, carissima,” said Maddalena, “I have had a dream, and the dream-book tells me that it means a meeting and a joy, and thou shalt meet thy true-love, or another better, and then shall I give thee back the china bowl.”
Violante was not without some lingering belief herself in the dreams and visions which Maddalena had impressed on her all her life. So it helped her a little way on her new start in life when, the last night she slept on Italian soil, she dreamt that she gave Hugh an olive-branch and that he put it into the china bowl.
She needed every little help when she sobbed and wept at parting with her father, and begged him to forgive her all she had not done.
“Ah, child, you were no good,” he said. “But do not cry; be happy, since you will not be great.”
Signor Mattei turned away, when he was left to his solitude, with a certain sense of freedom. He laid his plans for going to Florence, and thought of the dream of his youth—an opera that he had never written, but which now, perhaps, might find its way from his brain to his fingers. But he could not lay his hand on the particular piece of music that he wanted, all the store of violin-strings were mislaid, his salad was made with bad oil, and he was so much at a loss for some one to find fault with that he rushed off to find old Maddalena in her new situation and accuse her of packing up his fiddle-strings in his daughters’ box. And Maddalena, having a sore heart of her own, reproached him so unreasonably with having driven her dear young ladies out of the country that she quite restored his self-complacency; and, having refreshed her spirits by this outbreak, she went back and found the violin-strings, and hinted that when il signor was settled at Florence he had better send for her to come and keep house for him.