CHAPTER XIII
HAVING EMPTIED MY POCKET, I OFFER MY HAND, BUT RESERVE MY HEART
We sat down upon the steps of a church—San Pietro was its name, a very old church. For a while we were silent; Virginia, it was to be seen, was now timid—timid to the verge of defiance; I was curious, and curiously excited.
Mastering myself, I asked her in as redoubtable a voice as I could summon, what she did here, in Pistoja. She then looked at me with her tragic eyes—grey eyes they were, tinged with black; and looking steadily always, without a trace of fear, she answered, "You know very well why I am here."
"Indeed," I exclaimed, "I know nothing of the sort. I don't in the least understand you." Her calmness, her unflinching regard were dreadful to me. "Do you mean me to suppose that your father—?" I could not finish with the horrid thought. She saved me that pain.
"My father has your money," said she, "and would have kept me at home if he could. But there he reckoned without his daughter. I left home some three hours after you, and got here before you, as you see."
I could not be indignant with her; there was that underlying her hardy speech which forbade precipitate judgment.
"My child," I said, "what do you mean to do?"
She shrugged her thin shoulders. "It is misery at home. Here, in Pistoja, there is not apparent misery, nor need there be any. Signer Francesco," she said, "look at me. I am sixteen years old, a marriageable girl, not ill-looking, not ill-made, starving, without a lover or the portion to buy one. What is to be done with me? What is to be the end of me? It seems that the world has to answer me that question. Am I to stop at Condoglia, and gnaw my knuckles, and work to the bone for another's benefit, and kennel with dogs and chicken? Why, my going will benefit them. The chicken will have more to eat. Or say that I do stop there—what then? Having nothing, needing much, I marry a man of my own nation, who has even less than nothing, and needs more than I do. In fact, he needs me only that I may fend for him. And then? And then, Don Francesco? More knuckles to be gnawed, more starving mouths to gnaw them, more dogs, more chicken to jostle for the pease- straw which I and my man and the children we choose to beget shall huddle on. Life in Condoglia! Ah, thank you for nothing, Don Francesco, if this is what you have bought for me with your fine gold piece."
I was dismayed. I was dumb at such a callous summing-up of my honest action. All I could stammer out was some feeble, trite protest against a disordered life, which sounded insincere, but certainly was not that. When I urged her in the name of religion to go home, she opened her eyes with an expression of scornful incredulity. She was fully six years younger than me, and yet strangely my senior. Without being told so, I had the intuition that to appeal to her on the part of religion was to invite failure.
"Do you ask me to agree with you?" she said slowly, "when I know what I know, and you so evidently know nothing? Who, pray, are you to judge whether it be unwholesome to the soul for the body to sleep in a good bed—you, who have rarely had a bad one? And can you tell me that it is a sin to wash the body, and feed and clothe it delicately, when all your life long you have had ministers to yours, as of right? What do you know of the inconvenience of the course I meditate when you have nothing with which to compare it? You! to whom hunger and nakedness are an adventure— yes, an adventure; undertaken for a whim or a frolic, I know not which. For fifteen days of your life you have gone fasting, unwashen to bed— but I for fifteen years of mine; consider me that, sir. Your experiences, again, may be ended whensoever you choose; you have but to write a letter, I suppose. But for me"—she touched herself on the breast—"they have no end at all, save one—and I have never learned to write. My good Don Francesco," said she lightly, "you don't know what you are talking about."
This gave me the courage, if not the opportunity, to assure her that I did. I entreated, reproached, exhorted her—to no purpose. Driven to it at last, I alluded again to my unlucky expenditure, when she drew herself up fiercely, and striking at me venomously, had me at her discretion.
"I am perhaps in your debt for that magnificent outlay of yours, Don Francesco," she said. "I am willing to admit it, if only to spare you the trouble of reminding me of it any more; and if you ask me to liquidate it, I cannot refuse you. I am at your disposition as soon as you please, and in any manner that you think proper. But if you think I am to be bought of my father and put in a cupboard like so much cheese, and locked up with a golden key kept in some man's pocket, you are very much mistaken."
Here, the reader may think, it would have been proper for me to have told her that she was a worthless girl, who might go to the deuce for all I cared; but if such is his opinion, it is not, and was not, mine. I shall not set down all the talk between us; it was beating the air on my side, and a steady trampling of solid earth on hers. My final argument, and that only, produced a certain effect upon this remarkably clear- headed girl. I told her that part of my story which dealt with Aurelia's perfections and my own disastrous imperfections; I made her understand that I was not the inexperienced man she had thought me; rather, I was one with two examples ever before him—one shining with the pure effulgence of Heaven, the other harsh, staring, horrible, like some baleful fire at sea. "Ah, Virginia," I concluded, "you must not misjudge me. It is a sinner who speaks to you, not a saint removed too far to help you. A sinner indeed am I, yet not utterly lost. I have a guide, a hope, a haven; I have a light whereby I may steer my poor barque. Aurelia Lanfranchi—no! let me call her by her own name—Aurelia Gualandi will save my soul alive. Oh, let her example be yours—and her excellence your means of excellence!"
Virginia, I say, was struck by these moving words of mine. She hung her head and seemed sunk in thought.
"I know nothing of this lady, nor of her nation," she said, more gently than before, "but what you say of her pleases me very much. Evidently you love her, and she you. But you must allow me to tell you now, what I was timid to say before, that she showed much good sense in putting you in the cupboard, and you remarkably little in jumping out of it. Half an hour more cupboard and your learned doctor had been asleep. Next day you could have made your plans with your lady. She would have rewarded you: but so she would if, when she invited you to accompany her, you had offered her your arm and put on your hat. What possessed you, then—what inscrutable reasons had you? But there would be no end to my questions and no satisfaction in your replies. Why, Heaven! the world was before you two! You had happiness, adventure, all the rest of it. And if you must needs wander this world, need I assure you that two are better company than one?" Fra Palamone, I remembered, had been of that opinion too. "As it is," she continued, "you may be years before you find Aurelia, and you must be prepared for any step she may have been driven to take in her extremity. I don't wish to wound you—but there can hardly be any doubt about her plans." She rose to her feet and looked kindly at me, saying, "I thank you for telling me your story. If I understand it, I think you are rather mad; if I don't, then I must be. But I admire you; I think I love you. I foretell happiness for you in times to come, but not of the sort you seem to hope for at present." She held out her hand to me. "Adieu, Don Francesco," she said, "we will part here. Do you go to find Aurelia Gualandi, I to search for a lover like you."
Deeply touched by this gentle conclusion of our argument, I held her hand and made her sit down again. She resisted—faintly, not seriously. I then told her that I did not intend her to leave me in this manner, or in any manner which did not assure me of her honourable wellbeing; and now it was she who pleaded feebly, now it was I who was convinced, fiery, unanswerable. I said that I was resolved to protect her honour, to work for her, to establish her firmly and comfortably in the world which had used her so ill. I told her that, being devoted entirely to the love of Aurelia, my company could do her no harm; that, on the contrary, the world, putting the worst construction upon our alliance, would actually respect her more and do her less injury than if she went into it alone. "I charge myself with your future, Virginia," I said, "as if you were my sister. I am young and able; I shall provide for you, never fear, until you are honourably and happily married. And you shall accept this service from me—the only one I can do you—upon my own terms; and respect the bargain that you make with me more than you have your father's."
She would not look at me, and said nothing; but she gave me both her hands, and bending her head until she reached them, kissed mine fervently and with humble gratitude. Thus began the most extraordinary partnership between a young man and woman which the world can ever have known.
For the plighting of it, Virginia took all the order and direction. I remember that she left me for a short time sitting there on the church steps, and returned with bread and salt, got I know not how or whence. She broke the bread, sprinkled it with the salt, and initiated me into a mystical meal of her own devising.
"This old church under which we partake our sacrament," she told me, "is called San Pietro's. It is here that, in times gone by, the Bishop of Pistoja went through the ceremony of a mystical marriage with the Abbess of the Benedictines, which has now been stopped by the Jesuits, because, more than once, it was not so mystical a business as it might have been. But I think the place very suitable for what you and I have to do."
With certain rites, then, of her own contriving—certain sprinklings of salt in a ring upon the ground about us, upon our heads and knees, with certain balancing of flakes of bread, and many signs of the Cross, Virginia and I celebrated a union which, I say with my hand on my heart, was intended by both of us to be as mystical as possible, and was so until, long afterwards, it was deliberately ended. At the end of her observances she took my hands in each of hers, crosswise, and looking earnestly at me, said, "We are now indissolubly bound together—by the communion of bread and salt—my pure intention to your pure desire. Together we will live until we find Aurelia—you as master, I as servant—you vowed to preserve my soul, I to succour your body. Let nothing henceforward separate us—but one thing."
"Amen to that, Virginia," I said, "and that one thing shall be a prosperous marriage for you."
So the bargain was struck; and now again I looked at the girl. The hard and bitter fires had burned themselves out of her eyes; nothing remained there but a clear radiancy. She was like a new creature, earnest, frosty cold, like a spirit set free. I have said she was handsome in a thin, fine way. She was very pale, black-browed, with firm, pure lips, a sharp chin, grey, judging eyes. She was lithe and spare like a boy, and very strong. Her hair, which was abundant and loosely coiled upon the nape of her neck, was nearly black; not of that soft, cloudy dark which made Aurelia's so glorious, but as if burnt, with a hot, rusty tinge here and there about it. Though not now in the rags in which I saw her first, she was still poorly dressed, in the habit of the peasantry of that country, in a green petticoat and red bodice, which, like that of all unmarried girls here, was cut to display the bosom. Her feet were bare, and her arms also to the arm-pits.
Such was Virginia Strozzi, for whom I had not then any symptom of what the world calls love. I do not deny that she interested me extremely, and was of great comfort and assistance, nor that, as the reader will soon see, I gave her, and with good reason, respect, gratitude, a strong affection—as much of these as a man can give to any woman born. Of her feelings towards me at this time I shall not attempt any relation. She herself had said that she loved me. Whether she meant by that more than a sympathetic affection, a common cause, an adventure shared, a comradeship, I know not—or at least I did not know then. All I have to add is, that she never betrayed it.